


a portrait of the artist as a con man

by p3trichor, putanauhere



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Art Forgery, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:02:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 38,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21548695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/p3trichor/pseuds/p3trichor, https://archiveofourown.org/users/putanauhere/pseuds/putanauhere
Summary: “And how did you come across a particularly sloppy Renoir reproduction?” Theo can’t help but ask as Boris gestures at the bartender for another two shots and smirks when Theo says reproduction. Even if Boris struck Theo as the art type, a fake Renoir is not the sphere of work that Theo could imagine Boris’ collection to be.Boris ticks a thumbnail against the side of his glass pensively. “Friend of friend gave it to me. A gift of sorts. One of my associates suggested I get it looked at by professional.”“And you found me,” Theo finishes for him.Boris holds his hands out, palms up, and replies, “Small world, no?”[Or art restoration expert Theo Decker finds himself slowly pulled into the high risk/high reward world of art forgery at the hands of his old classmate, Boris Pavlikovsky.]
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 53
Kudos: 273





	1. Chapter 1

Theo slips out of Hobart and Blackwell, walking two doors down to his own studio, just minutes before his 3 pm appointment. He takes more private sector work these days than working with museums, partly because there aren’t too many new masterpieces popping up out of obscurity, but mostly because he always gets the feeling he’s flying too close to the sun. 

This is the last of his appointments before he ships off to Boston for a restoration residency on a John Singer Sargent as a favor to Peggy at the Gardner, and he’s anxious to see it resolved quickly. That must be why the thought of the appointment buzzes uncomfortably in the back of Theo’s mind, the same frequency as the persistent worry that he forgot to turn off the oven before leaving the house.

His fingers pick through the code to disarm the alarm as he shrugs his coat off one shoulder, not at all elegant as he turns to the coat rack and shrugs the other arm off to hook it up quickly. As he sets the coffee pot in the corner brewing, Theo tries his name out a few times, trying to find the cadence of it so he doesn’t embarrass himself, and settles on something that sounds familiar, if not correct, just as the buzzer goes.

His 3 o’ clock is younger than Theo expects, shorter than Theo is, and dressed far warmer than Theo thinks is necessary. Theo is given a swift onceover, then a slower one, both immediately disarming, before Theo remembers himself and steps aside to let him in. “Mr. Pavliovsky, it’s good to meet you.”

He looks amused by this. “Sure.” He has the painting tucked under his arm, wrapped in what looks like a linen sheet, to Theo’s horror. He’s already seen what Mr. Pavlikovsky has in the way of provenance, and his hopes aren’t high, but in the off chance that’s a real Renoir he’s got in there - Theo is already sweating with the thought.

Theo hangs his thick winter coat and rests the Renoir - wrapped in a pillow case, he realizes - on the intake table, itching to yank it free from its cotton prison like a grand reveal, _ ta daaa_, but he’s a professional and lets his showroom do its showing. 

Mr. Pavlikovsky’s dark, critical eyes carefully scan the studio, eyes lighting on Theo’s work bench with its array of lights and magnifiers clamped to every available edge of the desk, surrounding like a frame to the Pissarro reproduction he has lying in wait on an easel. He moves toward the work bench with interest, leaning over to survey the painting closely but keeping his hands tangled together behind his back. Another win for the showroom. “Is this restoration?”

“God, no, I have a separate temperature controlled studio upstairs. This is… practice.”

His eyes flick up from the painting to the shelves of paints and small buckets of brushes stored above the bench where Hobie would keep chisels, hammers, and pliers. “You practice your craft in foyer of business instead of fancy art studio upstairs?”

“I - ” Theo stutters, never having been challenged on that.

“Is okay, I understand. You don’t sell art, you sell skill. Can’t frame a restored or debunked Pissarro on the wall, but you can leave gentle suggestion of experience on display.”

Theo stops up, irritated at having his intentions read so quickly, so easily by a stranger, but he doesn’t like the way it sounds almost nefarious on Mr. Pavlikovsky’s lips. Theo’s clientele often work on blind faith and reputation, and no one is allowed in his studio. Gentle suggestion is the only ammunition Theo has access to.

He turns to Theo, misreading Theo’s surprise about the easel’s placement for the easel’s content. “Did I pass the test?”

Yes, technically, yes, because everyone else tends to guess Monet, which is frankly insulting. But instead of answering, Theo smiles his customer-facing smile and gestures to Mr. Pavlikovsky’s painting. “Let’s have a look?”

He liberates the frameless Renoir from its slumber once he dons a pristine pair of white gloves and all six of its sides a quick scan before placing it down on the intake table. He knows immediately it’s a fake - one made with a lot of heart but a less than acceptable amount of skill. Nonetheless, he pulls his stool forward, switches his glasses for a specialized pair, and switches on an overhead light.

He’s joined at the table by Mr. Pavlikovsky, which is rare these days - even if his typical intakes are ten minutes or less, his clients are still glued to their phones or important business papers or a copy of the New Yorker. Theo’s not wild about having someone sit over his shoulder, he finished with that once he graduated from a formal university and from Hobie’s crash course in furniture restoration, but Theo allows him to stay in the name of customer service.

“Do you enjoy Pissarro?”

“I have seen - they have many of his paintings at the Met, is local, have you seen?” Mr. Pavlikovsky asks, and Theo’s heart shudders like someone has just walked over his grave. Shaken, he blinks his eyes firmly a few times and refocuses on the task at hand. Nobody has cared enough yet to draw the connection, and Theo himself has had no interest to check if the New York Times has memorialized the article with his name on it on the internet finally now that all copies of the paper should have been disposed of over fifteen years ago.

Thankfully Pavlikovsky doesn’t wait for an answer - he doesn’t seem to need one. “Beautiful painting of Montmartre, looks exactly like the boulevard! Have you been to Montmartre? Incredible, some things, they never change, you could paint same paintings today, same views, but with cars and tourists on cell phones instead of horses and carriages.”

“I’m sure I have seen it at some point. I am a fan of his landscapes, as you can tell.”

“Yes, you have a way with them.”

Theo’s cheeks heat up and he can’t quite figure out why, so he disguises it by lifting the canvas and taking a careful inhale down the right side of the canvas. If Mr. Pavlikovsky is concerned by this behavior, he doesn’t say so.

Theo frowns as he sets the painting back down. It’s a shame he won’t even have to get his x-ray out to get a look at the layers, but maybe he should - he could charge more for this session, and the longer an investigation, the more legitimate he seems. But from the way this conversation has gone so far, Mr. Pavlikovsky doesn’t seem like he needs the whole song and dance.

As if on cue, Mr. Pavlikovsky says, “I should leave you to work - I will come back later, no?”

“No need, I have made my analysis.” He strips his gloves and switches his glasses back out before turning his focus back to Mr. Pavlikovsky.

“Already.” It’s not phrased like a question, but the way he sounds impressed sends a wild thrill through Theo’s chest for a reason he can’t name.

“I’m sorry to say, Mr. Pavlikovsky, but this is a fake,” Theo says and braces himself for an impact that doesn’t come. Ordinarily there’s screaming and spitting, the unchecked pride of rich men bubbling over at being duped, and because they likely won’t be able to find the dealer again, Theo is the unfortunate sole recipient of their ire.

Instead Mr. Pavlikovsky grins and says, “How could you tell?”

There’s a lecture’s worth of material in this canvas, but most don’t want to settle in to listen to Theo drone on and on like the worst of his professors. Theo taps to six different problem areas, each of them having lit up like a glowing red sore as soon as Theo had laid eyes on them - poor blending, wrong paints for the time period - _ is that acrylic? really? _ \- thick careless strokes that indicated speed and not care, and more. “Here, staples here, this is wrong, no fraying on the canvas edges is immediately suspicious, this issue with the verso here. And Renoir typically signed his paintings with a signature tail at the end of his r - this, at its most charitable, is a smudge - and he almost never connected his o to his i.” He snags a piece of paper and fountain pen from his desk and works out a quick recreation, the bold r, the diamond-shaped o, then taps at it. “Reno-ir.”

Mr. Pavlikovsky leans in close to Theo’s shoulder, peering seriously at Theo’s scrawled signature. His proximity is enough to make Theo stifle a shudder. “Perhaps he was drunk this day.”

“No,” Theo says bluntly.

Mr. Pavlikovsky laughs, tracing his bottom lip with his thumb thoughtfully as he leans back. “It is fake,” he says, but in a way that almost sounds like he’s confirming what Theo has said to be true, instead of mulling over this new discovery.

“I don’t wish to presume, I’m sure the price is not an issue - if you would like me to perform the standard x-ray and microscopy to confirm, I am absolutely able to. But in the interest of preserving your time.”

He nods, like fair is far, and picks up the painting to stuff it back into the pillow case. 

“Sorry - I - my apologies, Mr. Pavlikovsky, would you mind? I know it’s not a real Renoir, but it is still. You know. I’d hate to see anything happen to it.”

He gestures an invitation. “Please.”

Theo quickly trims foam for the verso and wraps the whole thing in paper like a present. He presents the secure package back to Mr. Pavlikovsky, but neither of them move to complete the transaction. Something about the thing feels unfinished - _ yes, the money, _Theo’s brain helpfully supplies - but Theo doesn’t think that’s it.

Mr. Pavlikovsky digs out a tight bundle of cash anyway, too many hundreds stuffed into a straining silver money clip that he peels their agreed upon fee from and slaps onto the table. It feels almost dirty transacting this way, Theo used to wires, money orders, checks, and the like - cash feels uncouth. One of Pavlikovsky’s hands repockets the money and the other doesn’t go for the painting like Theo expects, but rather squeezes at Theo’s shoulder. “Well, if I can’t reward your speedy expertise with more money. Do you want to join me for drinks?”

“I’m not - um.” Theo swallows his initial objection, the way his mind leapt to that conclusion feels to telling. “Sorry? Drinks?”

“It’s not fun to pretend anymore, let you talk talk talk, _ Mr. Pavlikovsky this, Mr. Pavlikovsky that. _” He raises his eyebrows at Theo. “I will say it hurts my feelings you don’t remember me, Potter, though I know it was very long time ago.”

It’s the _ Potter _that does it, the fuzzy sort of familiarity with the nickname born from a cultural phenomenon he’d missed almost entirely with the timing of it. The only way it had nudged itself into Theo’s brain was through some drunk coed at a party he was desperately trying to fuck at a houseparty holding him by the waist and telling him firmly that she thinks he’s a Ravenclaw, whatever the fuck that is. And, of course, also through Boris.

“Shit, Boris, sorry, man, sorry,” Theo says, his face widening with a grin. “God, it’s been forever since Vegas?”

“You look good.” Boris pulls him into a hug Theo isn’t expecting, but allows himself to be collected into. “It’s good to see you.”

He hadn’t exactly kept tabs on Boris at the time beyond the few classes they’d shared together, the rare times they’d found each other in the same places, nodding affably from where they’d each stood at opposite sides of the room. 

His last memory of Boris had been at this party at some girl’s house - Hadley, maybe - and the two of them had straddled their legs over either side of a diving board over the winter-emptied pool, and tried to lean forward and take lines off the laminate, giggling and knocking heads and clutching at the sides, at each other, every time the board would shiver and shake with their movements. Theo had already been fucked up on something he’d stolen out of Xandra’s purse just to give him enough motivation to leave the house, letting the world grow opaque in front of his eyes like it’d be easier to live in if he just couldn’t see it, but he remembers Boris at the time, clear as day, like his nearsightedness had transfigured into Borissightedness. 

He remembers Boris being taller than he was at the time in a way that burned jealousy into his skin - a non-contest he is too secretly pleased to have won out in the end now - and the way Boris would wear his hair in the style that his mom used to call _ Needs a Haircut _ and his dry, calloused hands that held onto Theo’s wrists when he risked toppling over into the pool and the urgent way he’d whisper _ I got you _ like it wasn’t anyone else’s business to know.

Looking at Boris now, things shift slightly until they click into place, it’s like the sensation of sliding on glasses for the first time and realizing the world was not an impression, not muted, but all sharpness and defined edges and tangibility. Of course it’s Boris. 

“Come get a drink with me,” he presses.

Yes, technically, yes, that’s what Theo wants, but. “I can’t - I fly to Boston tomorrow morning.”

Boris checks his watch in an outrageous flash of silver. “Is sixteen hour wait at the airport, or what? You can’t take night off your busy schedule and have a drink with an old friend?”

Theo would hesitate to call them old friends. He’d hesitate to call them anything, but there’s a potential humming under the surface now that had always been there back in Vegas. He hadn’t known what it was, what it meant back then - it was just shared snorting at the dumb puns Mrs. Mullin would say to get everyone excited about earth science, sitting silently beside each other on the bus when there were no more empty seats left, and holding each other by the waist only when they were wasted at a pool party on the weekend and acting like it never happened on Monday morning. 

But Theo knows what the buzzing is now - the desperate desire to have a friend and the fierce inability to let himself have one. Boris leaves the painting on the desk and scoops up his coat. He holds the door open for Theo, his way of telling not asking again. So Theo grabs his coat as well and thinks maybe he can let himself have something now, maybe just this one thing. 

“It’s good to see you too,” Theo says, but it doesn’t feel like enough.

\--


	2. Chapter 2

It’s maybe Theo’s own fault that he lets Boris pick the place, but he has to resettle his expectations that _let’s get drinks_ did not also imply _let’s get an early dinner that lasts three hours_ _and costs hundreds of dollars _like it normally does when the kinds of people Theo hangs out with suggest drinks. Instead Boris leads them confidently down 10th street towards the Hudson into a brick hole in the wall that somehow looks as though it’s both seen better days and is still living through its better days. Rockbar, it’s called, is almost empty this early in the evening, and Boris settles them into the two stools at the corner of the bar. Two shots of vodka appear before Theo even realizes Boris has ordered. 

“So! What has Potter been up to since escaping desert hell? Was something of a scandal, I must say, disappearing into the night, everyone wondering where you’d gone. You were the talk of school for months, _ where is Potter, what does he do now_, _ I heard he joined circus_.” 

“Ah,” Theo half-laughs, pulling off his glasses to clean them on his shirt sleeve, just for the distraction. It’s just like teenagers to only give a shit about you once you’re gone. He thinks he can get away with the non-verbal deflection, but Boris is watching him with the same rapt attention he had as a teenager, always managed to convince people he was sober with how closely he would listen to them even if he was fucked up on a plethora of drugs. Theo did not share the same talent. “Came back here. Went to college.” Theo shrugs. “Majored in art history and got my graduate degree in conservation. I’ve been in the field for about five years now.” 

Boris pouts, like Theo’s clipped explanation isn’t good enough, but he doesn’t push it, instead reaching for his shot glass and raising it. “Well. To old friends.” 

“To old friends,” Theo replies and they both take their shot in one go. 

When Theo doesn’t react at all to the burn of the alcohol Boris laughs, surprised and smiling, “You have not changed a bit, Potter.” 

Something warm swells in Theo’s chest, maybe the vodka. Part of him wants to argue, find out what Boris really thinks he knows about Theo, but the overwhelming majority says it’s nice to pretend someone was paying attention, even if he didn’t know it. “Well? And what has the infamous Boris Pavlikovsky been doing?” 

Boris raises his hands in a shrug. “Little of this. Little of that.”

“And how did you come across a particularly sloppy Renoir reproduction?” Theo can’t help but ask as Boris gestures at the bartender for another two shots and smirks when Theo says _ reproduction_. Even if Boris struck Theo as the art type, a fake Renoir is not the sphere of work that Theo could imagine Boris’ collection to be.

Boris ticks a thumbnail against the side of his glass pensively. “Friend of friend gave it to me. A gift of sorts. One of my associates suggested I get it looked at by professional.”

“And you found me,” Theo finishes for him. 

Boris holds his hands out, palms up, and replies, “Small world, no?” 

Impossibly small, Theo thinks, but maybe that’s the nature of an orbit. People only ever move in circles around each other, sometimes stretching at opposite ends, sometimes riding too close, and they’d notice how they get slung back together more often if only they’d look up and out. The two of them are closing the loop on this circle, Theo’s second second chance since running back to New York. He’d sought out Hobie, but Boris sought out Theo.

They grow quiet, too tight lipped to talk about themselves, too much of strangers to know how to talk about anything else. Theo watches Boris lit up by the weak sunlight that filters in through the windows, just the tips of its reach grasping at Boris’ pale face. Boris has grown up handsome, some of his sharp angles softened by time or maybe just by the smile that eats away at his face instead of the perpetual scowl he was known for. 

Boris grins easily when they’re delivered their second shots of vodka, trades another toast with Theo, this time in Russian (probably), that Theo echoes incorrectly (definitely), and follows up with, “The fuck do you know about Pissaro?” 

“Enough,” Boris answers, an eyebrow raised so Theo knows he’s full of shit. 

Theo decides art is safe enough, the same way he has his whole life, too familiar to him, too intrinsic to escape. Someday an autopsy will be performed on Theo’s body, and they’ll find a gallery in there, bold Rothko red in his blood, water lilies for organs, one golden bird beating its wings in place of a heart. 

An hour passes before Boris asks him the simplest question, the one that is the hardest to answer - “Do you have a favorite painting?”

Theo lies because he knows what lives in his heart, what he’s stolen away and coveted, what he owns but can’t ever see. Favorite doesn’t even begin to cover what it means, the words haven’t been invented yet. “I don’t,” he tells Boris.

“Please. You must have favorite artist at least.”

“No.”

He can tell Boris is starting to get frustrated now, by the firm set of his brow and the stiffness of his voice. “Potter. Favorite artist. Favorite museum. Favorite something. You are artist - ” 

“I’m not an artist.”

“ - artists live for this shit.”

“I’m not an artist,” Theo insists. 

“You tell me that painting in your foyer is not art? Bullshit. _ Bullshit_. You have skill, attention to detail, not everybody can do this thing, trust me, I know, is very difficult and you have talent. You are artist. Try again.”

“Jesus,” Theo mutters, hopefully too quiet to sound as obviously heartfelt as it is, and curls his hand around his pint. Theo’s downgraded to beer because he’s not in college anymore and propriety tells him to work at a drink instead of pounding shots, but he wishes he was drunker than he is. For his part, Boris looks like he’ll wait on Theo’s answer all night. “Fine.” Theo casts around for something safe, something that doesn’t even breathe in the direction of the truth. “Picasso.”

“No! Not Picasso!” Boris pounds his hand on the bar - for some reason he genuinely seems horrified by Theo’s response. 

Startled, Theo asks, “What’s wrong with Picasso?”

“So ugly. No life. Childish shapes on canvas, there are no stakes. He gains nothing, he loses nothing, he says _ nothing_. Says he is looking for truth, yes? What is the phrase?”

“Objective truth,” Theo supplies, taken in by the fire and passion in Boris’ voice.

Boris snaps at Theo. “Yes. There is no objective truth, no black and white. Only grey, good and bad and bad and good. We live in grey, we speak and feel and die in grey. You know this grey.”

Theo keeps his face set because he doesn’t know if he agrees, necessarily. He knows himself, and what he’s done wrong, and thinks he lives every day in the darkness, in the black. Nonetheless, he agrees, like a cover story, “Art exists in the grey area.”

“Better to have jizzed all over canvas instead. It would have made his point better.” Boris quirks his eyebrows, his argument won, or at least completed, and downs another shot.

Theo’s hands cover his face, his palms pressing the smile down at the edges of his lips, his fingers slipping up under his glasses to bracket his eyes. His professors, not yet dead, must still somehow be rolling in their graves over this, and Theo really couldn’t give a shit. From his memory, he can hear his mom humming over a Braque, gently explaining its importance and moving on to the next painting faster than she would most of the others. It wasn’t like her to tell Theo a piece of art was bad - she focused mostly on sharing her enthusiasm - but once Theo was old enough, he learned how to read her, to sense her distaste in the tilt of her head and the furrow of her brow. 

“For you? Picasso?” He wags a finger in Theo’s direction. “Is a lie. I know you, Potter.” 

Theo bites down on the obvious objection, _ you don’t know shit_, but only because it wouldn’t be true. If he could be read this easily by someone he hasn’t seen in a solid fifteen years, if all of his thoughts and intentions are laid bare after two shots and half a pale ale, then Theo is terrified at what else he may have given away without permission over the years.

Boris nudges his knee against Theo’s. “I will crack you some day,” he says confidently, like their future together is guaranteed. The sound is foreign to Theo’s ears.

“Who’s your favorite then?”

Boris scoffs, waves a dismissive hand. “Don’t have one.”

That prompts a laugh from Theo, a genuine one that catches him off guard. “Sure, Boris.” He hides the rest of his grin in his pint, and lets Boris continue to guide the conversation, like he has fifteen years’ worth of thoughts built up and ready to spill now that they’ve found out how to talk to each other. 

“You were painting in school. This I remember, very dirty hands.” Boris reaches out and collects up one of Theo’s hands, inspecting it closely for paint that won’t be there. It’s not professional, he can’t get away with the rough edges vibe that Hobie has, because it’s like Boris says - he sells a skill, not a product. Boris tilts his hand this way and that, a thumb swiping absently across one of his knuckles, his inspection far too thorough for Theo’s comfort level, their hands growing hotter together the more Theo thinks about them being tangled.

“Yes.” Theo slowly takes his hand back under the guise of taking another drink. 

“You used to have paint under your fingernails, always paint, like you couldn’t wash out.”

The truth is he didn’t try - he left it there until it scabbed off or the shower finally won out. He’d always kept the rest of himself clean, his mother’s influence coupled with his old school’s rules - washed hair, clean clothes, non-scuffed shoes - but his hands started to wear paint on them like battle scars, evidence that he’d made something instead of sitting in his room, staring at his ceiling, wondering if his roof was high enough to make the impact he wanted.

“Did you ever talk to the guidance counselor? Mrs. C.”

“I must have - was in and out of offices all the time, hands wringing, _ hmm, hmm hmm, how do we solve a problem like Boris_, they would tell me.”

“Yeah. Yeah, me too. Mrs. C, she put me in art class, to deal with, like.” Theo gestures, but then Boris just says it.

“Your mom dying.” 

“Yeah,” he laughs, humorless. “Fuck.” 

“Art class is kind of mean, because.” Boris gestures, but Theo doesn’t say it - _ she got blown up in an art museum. _ “Like exposure therapy. My mother was dead too, but they did not prescribe me a handle of Stoli and a three story window.”

“Boris, what the fuck.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Boris waves again, as if it’s not important, as if there’s not an entire story to unpack there, same as Theo. “Please continue.”

“No, it’s just - she wanted me to do something. Like if I had a hobby I wouldn’t have been,” Theo swallows down _ so lonely _because it sounds just as pathetic now as it did then, and he’s never been interested in anybody’s pity. “I liked it, though, I liked painting. Don’t ever tell her she was right.”

He says he isn’t an artist because he’s been told he isn’t one. He’d handed in copies of the old masters for his assignments, and been returned begrudging C’s because _ the work is exquisite, but the intent isn’t there. _He painted like he could reach out and touch his mother’s cheek through the canvas, as though he could conjure up her smile in each stroke. He was obsessed with the paintings she knew, the paintings she loved, so he only ever painted those, or got as close as he could with his limited skill. It felt wrong to create anything new because she wouldn’t be here to see it. It felt as if all art should have stopped production in her honor, to preserve the world just as she’d seen it.

“So you were artist. You see, I was right. I know these things.” Boris taps at the side of his nose. “I remember, this painting of a dog, like a cotton ball in motion, such life in this painting. They had it hanging at the front of school, place of honor next to seventeen bowls of fruit.”

“Popper, yeah,” Theo says. “My, uh. My dad’s wife had a dog.”

He’d hated that painting, the one time he’d stretched and made something of his own, answering a threat to _ create, Theo, create_, from his teacher or she’d fail him. But he couldn’t, he can’t. He wouldn’t know how. And anyone who had known better, who had really looked at the painting, would have known it was entirely derivative of a work by Titian. 

“What happened to it?”

Theo shrugs, he can’t imagine that Xandra would have spent any more time and attention on the dog left alone in that house than she would have when it was full. “He’s dead, probably.” 

“No, the painting.”

“Oh. I’m sure she threw it out. I couldn’t, um. Take it with me. To New York.” He’d only had room for one painting, not that he could ever say, and there wasn’t much of his life in Vegas that he would have wanted to take with him, even if he could. If he’d had any more money and any firmer of a plan waiting for him in New York, he’d have left it all behind and just taken his painting. 

Boris looks crestfallen, even though he had to have known that’s what would have happened. “I wish I had known! I would have bought. No, seriously,” Boris insists when Theo pulls a face. “A Theo Decker original? I’d have paid, oh. Three dollars, easy!”

“Wow, break the bank, Boris. Three whole dollars.”

“I am very generous man, Potter.” 

“Fuck you,” Theo says softly, no heat to it. “Why would you have wanted it?”

“I liked it.”

Theo doesn’t remember too much of Boris, but he does remember this. “You didn’t like anything back then.”

Boris tilts his head. “I liked you.”

Theo doesn’t know what to say to that, it feels too weighty to consider carrying. A man saves him, knocks into him, unnecessarily steadies Theo after with a warm hand on his back, and says, “Sorry, sweetheart.”

Theo just blinks after him; it’s like Boris’ spell is broken and the world fills in around them. The bar is filling out with a casual crowd mixed in with the ones who’ve just gotten off work, shucked their jackets and rolled up their sleeves. On the stool beside Theo is a woman with her legs spread open, holding onto the belt loops of another woman tucked in between them. His eyes sweep the room again, taking in at least two rainbow flags and other pairs of men tucked in together like Boris and Theo are. 

They’ll look like they’re on a date together, leaned in as close as they are, and Theo thinks he should lean back, lean away like _ oh that’s not what this is_ but there isn’t much room. “Where the fuck are we?” Theo turns back to ask, and Boris laughs, another hand waving, _ not important_.

It isn’t important, he tells himself firmly, even if he isn’t fully convinced. He’s got Boris looking at him like he hasn’t a glance to spare to the rest of the bar, and he’s saying things he’s never spoken out loud before, and instead of feeling terrified by it, he’s feeling slowly comforted, like loosening a belt after Thanksgiving dinner. It’s happy hour by now so Theo thinks he should be.

\--


	3. Chapter 3

Boston is lonelier than Theo expects it to be, and considering he hasn’t cared about being alone since he was thirteen, this is concerning. Ordinarily he approaches his trips around the country without fuss, his head down, dedicated above all else to the task at hand to not only to maintain his reputation but hopefully finish early so he can slink back off to New York, not that there’s much waiting for him other than extreme familiarity and his next paycheck. It’s different this time, and it’s not taken Theo an extensive amount of analysis to find out why.

Boris texts like Theo’s worst nightmare, like a thirteen-year-old wearing a blindfold, all unnecessary abbreviations and wild misspellings that Theo tries to excuse - English isn’t even his second language, it’s probably his fifth, and he is working from a nine-key flip phone circa 2003 - like he isn’t a full grown adult fully capable of purchasing an iPhone. He spends more long minutes dedicated to decoding Boris’ enthusiastic messages than he does studying and game planning for the Singer Sargent, which, at this point, he feels he can do in his sleep.

Boris texts like each individual message is an invitation for a future get together, a steady catalog of all of the places he plans to take Theo for a drink, with a date and time Theo dutifully logs into his iPhone’s calendar. Theo doesn’t ask any questions and tries not to stir the pot, one eye always kept on the statistical unlikelihood that Boris likes the person he’s become in addition to the person he’d been back in Vegas - so far they couldn’t be more different to each other. The other eye is trained on the fact that it’s virtually impossible to make friends as an adult, especially given he lost all of his friends when he lost Kitsey, all of them picking sides so efficiently that Theo wonders if they too hadn’t been counting down the days until their inevitable implosion.

The key to restoration is the flow, Theo’s discovered, to long hours working uninterrupted so that he can keep track of the narrative he’s building in his work, to know where he’s been and where he’s going, and that’s why it’s positively absurd that Theo nearly knocks over a full glass of water reaching at his phone when it buzzes with a new text. 

Theo transcribes  _ Wht ru dong 2day _ as a query on the day’s efforts, and he doesn’t immediately know how to synthesize it well enough that Boris can read it on his toy-sized phone screen without scrolling for hours. 

The painting Theo is working on today is in rough shape, had been locked away in someone’s damp attic for decades clearly, its canvas wilting into nothing in the bottom right corner. Theo has to thread and paste pieces of the canvas back together, painstaking, backbreaking work, before he can even glance in the direction of paints. 

He leaves his phone untouched, distractions unwelcome, until he sits down for a very late room service dinner at the desk in the corner of his hotel room, finding only a single follow up text from Boris, some twenty minutes after his first, that simply reads  _ ok well im n midtwn!  _ It’s strangely comforting to know, even some seven hours after the fact.

Hovering his finger over the call button, he thinks he should just do Boris a favor having to read twenty-seven cramped texts with a magnifying glass. By the time the phone begins to ring, he knows he’s made a mistake and hopes for the line to make the switch switch to voicemail just to prove that life isn’t like the movies and nobody wants to talk to you just because they can, that all person-to-person interaction should either be scheduled in advance - calendar invite set with a time, place, length of stay, and guest list - or through a method of communication that gives you free reign to ignore it for hours or forever.

Theo should have known better, even in this short time, that Boris will always keep him on his toes. There’s an echo to his voice, but it’s quiet wherever he is - which means Theo likely has Boris all to himself.

“Potter! I saw most incredible thing in Bryant Park today. It was a man, topless - freezing, is negative two outside, really, his nipples erect - anyway, was topless, standing against bush, pissing! And this is normal, you know, man pissing in public, sure, but he watched me the whole time, direct eye contact, like challenging a bear. At least back home we had the decency to turn around, to piss in corners with your back to the street. But you Americans, no shame at all,” is how Boris answers the phone, then doesn’t stop talking for another forty minutes.

Theo picks up context clues along the way - Boris still keeps temperature in Celsius, home is somewhere vaguely European, the Sergio he met with today is either a butcher or a tailor or both, and when he says “poke” he’s genuinely mispronouncing the type of raw fish that’s in fashion these days. During the process, Theo quietly finishes his dinner and migrates out to the balcony, wrapped up in a coat and shivering just so he can light up without prompting a cleaning fine for his non-smoking room. Boris monologues adeptly, Shakespearean both in length and severity, before he stops abruptly and says, “Anyway, you never answered my question.”

Theo thinks back over the last forty minutes - Boris hasn’t come up for air, let alone asked a question. “Which one?”

“What are you doing today?”

The part of Theo that had been clenching tighter and tighter the last few minutes loosens, less like a snake sure it’s made its kill and more like rope gaining slack, that Theo isn’t just an outlet for Boris to chatter to when there’s nobody else better, all of his questions and cares about Theo forgotten now that they’d gotten them out of the way back at Rockbar last week. 

He still lives with that sort of childhood-born fear that he greets everyone with, even Hobie for the first full year back in New York -  _ you’re not with me, looking at me, talking to me just because you’re bored, right _ ? It had been one of the bigger sticking points in his and Kitsey’s relationship, that he’d double and triple check it was okay if he came with her to whatever plans she’d had, somehow always feeling like a fifth or seventh wheel even though he was the one dating her.

“Why do you always ask that?” she once asked him.

“Just checking,” he’d said, easier to read than he’d like, and she pressed a soft hand to the side of his face.

“Just because your dad didn’t want you around doesn’t mean nobody else does,” she replied in a way that she thought was supposed to comfort him but instead put another crack in his heart, one step closer to shattered. And then she won all of the friends in the breakup.

Theo gives a swift rundown, leaving out any of the technical details that he only really tells Hobie because only Hobie ever really understands them, and the condensed version doesn’t sound too impressive, but Boris has seen his studio, has seen him in action, and Theo doesn’t have to worry about impressing him anymore.

Boris, for his part, sounds intrigued by the detail though. “Is not all painting then?”

“No, there’s some,” Theo pauses before he says it out loud, mostly because he’s never said it out loud, he just thinks quietly to himself that in his research phase he’s doing his  _ detective work _ , but now that he’s about to admit it out loud, it makes him sound like he snoops around wearing a trenchcoat and holding a magnifying glass. But he says it anyway.

“Detective Potter, okay,” he says with a laugh, “did you solve all your mysteries?”

“Almost,” Theo says. “There are three reference pictures of this painting that I’ve been able to uncover, and one of them is in black and white. So much of the work I have ahead is likely guesswork, which is… less than ideal.”

“Instead of guesswork, maybe it is freedom, no? To be an artist.”

Theo shakes his head, even though he knows Boris can’t see it. “Did you hear about the restoration of  _ Ecce Homo _ a few years ago?”

“No, what is?”

“This woman in Spain tried to restore this fresco of Jesus and it ended up looking like a sad, disfigured alien. The laughingstock of the restoration community, you have no idea how many parables we’ve collected up. One mistake and my career is over. I could disfigure this dress, this piece of  _ history _ , one hundred and fifty years of growing immortality stunted. I might as well should set it on fire.”

“So dramatic.” Boris grows quiet on the other end for a while, like he’s thinking deep thoughts, or maybe he’s fallen asleep. “I don’t know, Potter, sounds like maybe is easier to just redo, no? Nobody would probably know the difference.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve thought that,” Theo admits. It’d save him a lot of time and Adderall if he just scrapped the whole thing and recreated it from scratch. He’s always felt a level of pride when he’d finished a restoration, as though he were responsible for creating the thing himself, even though he’s always weighted down by the ego of it all in the presumption that he could equal great masters, that he was worthy enough to paint alongside them. 

“Have you done it before?”

“No,” he says quickly, but it’s just not the whole truth, so he amends, “not professionally, of course.” 

“This I have to know,” Boris presses, and Theo finds himself folding easily, admitting out loud something he’s never put into words before, something he’s not sure he would have known how to put into words. He feels so locked up, not just with secrets, but with things he doesn’t think anyone should care to hear, but Boris liberates this long, delicate strand of memory and Theo can’t figure out if it was ever meant to be a secret in the first place.

The first painting Theo replicated in earnest was a Cassatt. It wasn’t even on a real canvas and the colors were off, Theo just trying to use up the last nubs of his oil pastels, to break his hands back in after the break he’d taken from art after leaving Vegas. It was not about the accuracy anyway, he supposes when he thinks back on it. He was eighteen years old and the five year anniversary of the Met bombing was reverberating through the city like an unavoidable tsunami, rolling over Theo every hour like a rip current, like never-ending punches to the gut, felt like the floodgates of every anniversary he’d been able to avoid in years prior had come rolling in like every dose of bad karma Theo’s ever put off. 

He was flipping through the coffee table book of art in Hobie’s living room, had looked at it a hundred times before, but that day it had felt like the first time he’d ever seen it. Cassatt’s  _ The Child’s Bath _ settled heavy on his chest like nothing he’d felt in years. He wanted to rip out the page impulsively, tuck it into his wallet, but instead he picked up the book, carried it to the kitchen table, and found a piece of computer paper. 

Something about the child’s arm on the mother’s thigh, her hand gentle but firm around the baby’s waist as she washes their feet provoked a memory of his mother, sharp and unexpected. She insisted on cutting Theo’s hair. His head bent into their basin sink while she scrubbed her knuckles against his scalp washing his hair, tugging his ear gently. He blinked hard against the memory, trying to tuck it away in his head (to remember it? To forget it? He’s not sure, not even now) before he started mimicking Cassatt’s strokes, the stripes of the mother’s dress and the water in the bowl. 

The end result was a mess, earnest but untrue, so he flipped the page over and started again. He’d scattered the whole surface of the kitchen table with copies, each increasing incrementally in accuracy, like the evolution of man, until he was as satisfied as he could be with the output - or his pastels had withered into crumbs, he can’t quite remember. The spread of art before him felt too enormous to comprehend, too much for his eyes to soak in and his heart to feel, so he’d scooped up the lot and thrown them away.

He had fixated on Cassatts’ work for a long while after that, consumed any and all articles he could find about her, but couldn’t help but feel like this isn’t his place. Cassatt was revered for her ability to capture the intimacies of motherhood and the special simplicity of maternal instinct and women’s abilities to stand alone. That had been so important to his mother, he knew that much, and even though he understood the emotion, he couldn’t lay his hands on it directly, no matter how much he wanted to. He knows everyone becomes their parents, and he had whipped himself into such a fervor trying to become the right one.

Theo pictures again the pile of discarded Cassatts in the trash, how he’d poured leftover coffee over it just so no one would mistake it for anyone important. Nobody would ever know if he just repainted the Singer Sargent, Theo thinks, but also he would know and he would have horrified his mother if she had known.

He cuts himself off before he admits that, rubbing at the back of his neck and finally pushing himself back into the hotel room, the joint long finished. “You make me talk too much.”

“Is a nice change,” Boris says, but he doesn’t say from what. “More Decker originals in the bin. Who are you, Monet? Destroying your art. I can’t believe, not a single one you sold, all this work for nothing.”

“It wasn’t for nothing,” Theo says quietly, his toes digging into the carpet. He understands that he fully monetizes art now, that it’s useless to him without a price tag, but it wasn’t about that then, it was catharsis, screaming into the void because the void wouldn’t ever scream back, the void wouldn’t ever tell him it wasn’t a big deal. 

It’s quiet for a few moments, not tense but calm, the sound of their breathing nearly matched in harmony, and Theo tries to think what he could say that would possibly be safe, that wouldn’t give away any of his secrets. Then he can hear the sound of Boris shifting around on the other end, and a tap squeaks its way on and begins to pour.

“Boris.”

“Mm?”

“Are you taking a fucking bath?”

“So what if I am?”

“We’re on the phone,” Theo says blandly.

“Can you see?”

“No.”

Boris’ voice drops smoothly. “Do you want to?”

Theo rolls his eyes and Boris laughs. “Fuck off. You regularly take baths at,” Theo checks his phone and realizes with a start it’s been two hours since he’s called, “1 am?”

“You must relieve yourself of social construct of time,” Boris answers like he’s just echoing what he’s heard someone else say without fully understanding it. “This means I take bath and eat oatmeal at 1 am? So be it, who are you to judge?”

“I guess you’re right.”

“You are also awake now, you know.”

“I don’t sleep much at night.” 

Theo hates the quiet - it’s far too quiet in this tucked in corner of Boston, he’s learned. For as many months of the year as he can manage while the weather behaves, Theo sleeps with his window cracked to let the sound of the eternally busy city fill up the space around him because silence feels suffocating, silence feels like an aftermath, like death. 

“Me neither,” Boris says, strained, with enough thumping and splashing to suggest he’s fully climbed into the bath now. “Too much to do, always busy, busy, busy. Too many hours in a day not to take full advantage.”

Theo can’t relate. He sits quietly and pulls at a hangnail until he irritates the skin all around it, tugging at the skin so hard it might start bleeding. “I should get going.”

“And do what?”

“What I normally do when I can’t sleep.” He eyes the bottle of pills on the nightstand, the only one he has a prescription for, though his doctor is starting to hint at downgrading his dosage to mitigate his dependency, laughable because she doesn’t know he’s been on it for the better part of a decade. 

“Masturbate?” Boris guesses.

Theo fully stands up from the bed, as if to physically distance himself from the suggestion. “What? No - take an Ambien.”

“Ambien is good, but have you tried masturbating?”

“Yes, Boris, I used to be a teenager with an empty house and a long history of sock shaped conquests.”

Boris gasps, water splashing at what sounds like the force of his movement, maybe as he sits up in shock. “You haven’t masturbated since Vegas? God, Potter, suddenly everything starts to make sense.”

Theo opens his mouth to argue before he realizes. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Yes, you are very good at this detective work, I must say.”

“I hope you drown,” Theo lies, grinning and weightless with the joke, all of the tension that had been building up as he’d spilled his secrets finally releasing like the slow, steady hiss of a bike tire deflating.

“Good night, Potter,” Boris says, his grin evident in each word too. Theo echoes him and waits for a moment and then two and then three before it’s clear Boris means for him to hang up first. So he does.

\-- 


	4. Chapter 4

He’s back a week before Boris calls again, not for pleasure but business, but it comes with an invitation to Boris’ apartment in the East Village, a surprisingly nice three story walk up that Boris somehow seems out of place in for the kind of life Theo’s imagined for him. He’s yet to mine from Boris exactly what he does for a living, but it clearly pays dividends.

Boston took longer than expected, but easy, knowing he would come back to his hotel at the end of the day to someone, even just over the phone. Boris had a question for everything, would press Theo for more information about his work, down to the way he holds the brush in his hand to mimic an artist’s strokes. He’d also fallen asleep to Boris’ interminable rambling, from wild accusations about corruption eating up his local Turkish baths (_have you been scrubbed by oak leaf, Potter? You haven’t lived yet)_ to Boris firmly telling him, _no no no you are Slytherin_, as though that made any fucking difference in Theo’s life. Sometimes he’d left Theo feeling wrung dry, as if there was nothing else he could give that he was able to, that only his deepest secrets were left. It’s why Theo’s hands can’t stop shaking, it’s why he’d gotten off the train at two different stops along the way, pacing up and down the platform each time until the next train, his canvas carrier and briefcase banging against his leg, before he finally convinced himself to just fucking do it.

In spite of that, he takes the train over to Boris’ anyway to mix business with pleasure. Boris answers the door still dressed for work - Theo imagines - coat off but blazer on, as though he hasn’t been home long. He grins wide, cups Theo’s face briefly before his hands slide down to Theo’s shoulders to start tugging at his scarf, the lapels of his jacket until Theo is rid of both of them, awkwardly shifting around the canvas in his hands. 

“You’re late,” Boris notes. Theo only shrugs, but gets away with it.

Boris’ apartment is large, taking up the whole floor, but sparsely furnished, like only the bare necessities have been identified and pulled in. Nothing about Boris thus far has hinted at a Spartan nature, not with the excess of trim coats, shining boots, and thick watches, and if Theo had met this space back in his time selling for Hobie in college, he’d have identified it as a second or third house, one that still needs the attention and care set to primary houses, one that deserves to be made into a home. They responded to that a lot, Hobie’s type of people - _make sure all your houses are homes_. It’s always flowed out of Theo’s mouth like a line of bullshit, one carefully crafted to convert, if only because Theo’s lived in too many houses to count since his mother died, and no amount of crowding it with shit, even something akin Hobie’s finest, have ever made the rest of them feel like a home.

“Drinks,” Boris announces, slapping at Theo’s back a few rough times before pressing his hand firmly between his shoulder blades to guide him to the kitchen. The kitchen is equally empty, only a single countertop cluttered with well-loved bottles of alcohol reminiscent of far too many dorms Theo had visited in college. Boris stands in front of the collection, a few fingers pressed to his lips in concentration, making the choice for Theo instead of asking for preferences in a bold move, but one that Theo now sees is fairly characteristic. Out of the fray, he carefully edges a bottle of whiskey, ornately carved glass in the shape of a pentagon, six or less fingers sloshing around in there. 

“Say when,” Boris tells him as he begins to pour into monogrammed tumblers that make Theo want to laugh.

Theo says when pretty quickly, at a reasonable amount, but Boris keeps pouring. “When. _When. _Boris.”

Boris chuckles and tips the bottle up, more than half the glass filled. He brushes the glass across the counter to Theo with the backs of his fingers, filling his own glass far less swiftly with the other hand. He trades Theo another Russian cheers, to which Theo says, “Yep,” not even bothering to try this time, and drinks. 

The whiskey burns all the way down, and Theo bares it as stalwartly as usual because he likes the fire, the way it settles heavy in his empty stomach. He doesn’t get drunk quickly anymore, but he hasn’t eaten in twenty-four hours and feels the challenge rising within him to battle his high tolerance and win. It’ll make this easier, losing himself always makes things like this easier. 

“You want a tour?” Boris is already walking into the next room, so Theo throws back half the glass in one go, just when he knows Boris isn’t watching. Theo slides his canvas carrier on the kitchen table, drops his briefcase in a chair, and shuffles after him.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s much to it.”

“Do not need much here,” Boris says, waving a hand around his living room, “need a place to watch TV and fuck. Sometimes is both in one place, but is good to have variety. We have sofa, we have bed.”

Theo laughs and makes a face to match Boris’ shit eating grin. “Of course.”

They stand, grinning at each other for a moment, both of Theo’s hands closed tightly around Boris’ monogrammed fucking tumbler, one of Boris’ hands tucked casually in his pants pocket. It’s edging up against too comfortable, and Theo doesn’t know what to do with that because comfort seems like it should come with a caveat, another shoe waiting to drop, swords hanging suspended over him on taut, weak strings waiting to be snipped or the hint of a strong wind to snap them. 

“We should,” Theo starts, to repurpose the silence into action, slowly tipping the scales from pleasure back to business.

Boris pauses for a moment before he lights up, like he’s only just remembered why he’s asked Theo to come over. “Yes! Yes, I will get it.” He nods off. “Best light in kitchen, I think.”

“Sure.” Theo slides into the kitchen, one eye on the doorway as he tops off his drink then knocks back enough to where the line looks about where it used to be. Then he thinks better of it and drains the whole thing, leaving the glass on the counter behind him.

He clears his canvas carrier off the table, digs out his work glasses, a few magnifiers, a pencil and notebook, and sets them neatly down on the kitchen table, nudging and fussing over them until they make a clean picture, like he isn’t set to ruin the configuration as soon as he works. The whiskey works its way down to his hands eventually, steadying them as though they were taken up and gently held. He’s perched himself on a chair, after turning every available light on, calm and focused, by the time Boris returns.

Boris has shed his blazer, the crisp black shirt he wears underneath rolled up to his elbows to expose at least one dark tattoo on his forearm that Theo can’t get a good look at. The painting in his hands is a Twombly, or at least he tells Theo it is as he sets it on the counter beside the stash of drinks. Theo frowns after it until Boris says, “Please. You first.”

Theo wants to argue - this little show and tell trade off Boris has orchestrated is odd enough, a little mix of pleasure as far as Theo is concerned, but Boris had demanded it when he couldn’t arrange a trip back to Theo’s studio. Theo’s been talking about his latest practice piece since he’d touched down from Boston without another job lined up. The carrier has always made satisfying little clacks upon unlocking and reveals a half-finished Bazille, a crowded canvas of men at the beach meant to sharpen Theo’s use of perspective in a process that would horrify Bazille himself for Theo’s flat refusal to paint _en plein air._

Boris presses himself against Theo’s shoulder instead of taking a seat beside him, listening as Theo describes his process and his purpose. His dark eyes sharply assess the work in progress in almost the same way as Theo’s does, as if to not take in the painting, to let it seep in through his skin like sunlight absorbed, but to pronounce judgement, to find Theo satisfactory or wanting. It makes Theo burn up with a self-consciousness about his work he hasn’t felt for years, not since school, and feels the mad rush to defend himself, to tell the truth and to lie just to save face. _It’s only a work in progress, I’m only fucking around, it’s nothing, it’s not important, it’s just practice._

But Boris simply says, “It is just as you described.”

“Yes,” Theo agrees, unsure what to make of that, “it is a lot of paint on a canvas, just as I said.”

“No, Potter. Full of warmth. Life - like cotton ball dog, yes? You see so much.”

Theo shakes his head - it doesn’t feel like that, it doesn’t feel burdened with intent. It’s the artist that gives him a directive and he sees it through, he provides their version of the truth. “I see what’s on the canvas.”

“This is seeing more than most,” Boris laughs, a derisive noise. “Trust me I know.”

Theo tenses, the back of his neck tingling. “And how is that?” 

“This, that,” Boris blows him off. Theo can’t call him on it, not as firmly as he should - _this is bullshit, I know you_ \- but rather leans on the confrontation style he’s been raised with. He turns and eyes the Twombly around Boris’ body before looking back up at him, and Boris gets his complete lack of subtlety. “Yes, fine, yes. My Twombly.”

Theo reaches up and places the canvas carrier on the far side of the table, still propped open for reasons he doesn’t want to admit. In turn, Boris settles the Twombly down on the kitchen table in front of Theo like a meal. 

It’s certainly a bit harder to parse out, by nature any piece of abstract impressionism leaves more room for a fake to go unnoticed. The methods of artists like Twombly, Pollock, or Rauschenberg who use more than one medium working in the twentieth century often result in genuine, original messes on the canvas that look forged and vice versa. Boris lingers over Theo’s shoulder until he must realize that this canvas will not be as easily identified as his Renoir and then he backs away respectfully.

It’s labeled to be one of Twombly’s earlier works, similar to his 1949 _Ritual_, bright splashes of oranges and reds and yellows but this one with a corner of greens and blues bleeding into the yellow edges and a faint 1952 and signature on the back corner. The canvas is a mix of oil and acrylic paint which, Theo supposes, isn’t all that far-fetched from what Twombly would have actually used, but he finds himself looking harder for clues that this is a fake than he might have normally. He’s almost convinced until something catches his eye, clumps of smeared wax crayon so close to the center of the large canvas that he has to stand up and lean over the table with a magnifier to get a closer look. “Boris,” he calls without looking up, holding the eraser end of his pencil gently against the spot on the canvas so he doesn’t lose sight of it. He hears Boris approach from the other side of the kitchen. “You’ve got another fake.”

Boris hums but he does seem more surprised this time than he did with the Renoir, Theo glancing up to see his brow furrowed where he’s looking at Theo’s pencil. He looks warped by Theo’s glasses, somehow both too small and larger than life at once, true to life in a different way that Theo can’t identify. “How can you tell?” 

“Well, the signature on the back is decent this time,” Theo allows, slipping off his glasses, “but it’s dated 1952. Twombly didn’t start using wax crayon regularly in paintings until the 60s.” 

Boris shrugs. “Maybe we have early experiment with crayons, here?” 

Theo tries not to grin but he really can’t help it, a smile slipping across his mouth when he taps the spot on the canvas he’s been keeping marked with a gentle hand. “Well, even if this Crayola crayon wrapper wasn’t from the last ten years, they didn’t start packaging them like this until the late ‘50s, so.”

Boris leans in to look closer at the offending paper wrapper, the tail end of what was likely a Magenta-named crayon sticking out of a clump of wax color in the thickest part of the canvas’s center. “Sloppy,” Boris hisses, a quick spark of anger that takes Theo by surprise. It’s extinguished as soon as it appeared, though, Boris stepping back and holding his arms out like _what can you do. _

“Maybe ask your friend of a friend for a gift card,” Theo says dryly, “or any gifts more useful than bad fake art.”

Boris barks a sharp laugh at that, the same laugh that would ring out in house parties and smokey basements in Vegas like a teenage mating call and makes a sweeping gesture at the Bazille. “Will tell my friend of a friend to come to your office and look at your easels, take notes!”

Theo can’t tell if Boris is joking or not, but he bristles anyway. “I’m not forging works, if that’s what you’re implying.” 

“Forging! No, no, you are not _forging_,” Boris corrects himself with a casual wave, picking the Bazille up gently out of its case and holding it before him. “Because forging implies intentional deception, yes? And you tell me you are just, ah, practicing here.” He tilts the Bazille. It looks out of place in his hands; his dark clothes frame him as a hulking shadow next to the soft pastels of canvas. “I understand that. But copying still, yes? So if friend of a friend wanted to learn copying tricks, well.” 

Theo’s put it together enough in his head to know what’s going unsaid here, and now he’s deciding if it’s worth it to say it. “I’d rather you not send your friend of a friend to my business, Boris,” he hedges, voice tight. 

Boris waves a dismissive hand. “Friend of a friend is getting fucking fired, anyway.” 

There it is, the suspicion that’s lived at the back of Theo’s throat since the fake Renoir put into the open. Boris is watching Theo carefully, like a caged animal pressed in at the kitchen table with the fake Twombly still laid out before him and the chair firmly at his back. When Theo doesn’t react, Boris shrugs, his next words reaching through the cage to poke Theo with a stick, “No better person to replace friend of a friend with, well. Old friend, perhaps?” 

“Boris,” Theo warns, over the sound of the other shoe dropping. 

Boris gently returns the Bazille into its case, but he still presses, “Would be much easier if it was just you than having to send someone here to just take notes from your work. Cut out middleman!” 

“I’m not going to help you commit _art fraud_,” Theo hisses like it’s a secret, like someone’s going to overhear through the ceiling or the floor. Boris remains unphased by Theo’s standoffishness, shrugging and giving a pointed look down at the fake Twombly between them. 

“Tomato, toe-mah-toe, Potter,” Boris says, and any other time his accent wrapping around the saying would have been funny, but Theo feels like a rubber band being stretched to its snapping point. “You say art fraud, I say booming business; you say replica, I say genuine.” 

“Except it’s _not_ genuine. Boris.”

“Looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, Potter, who is to say it is not a duck! But my artist was handing over geese and trying to pass them off as ducks.”

“Boris!” Theo shouts, rubber band snapped, hands gripping the edge of his table and Boris stops, mouth still half-open. Theo’s whole body is pounding, lightheaded and hollow like bird bones, like frantic golden wings beating. “Stop talking. No. I will not work for you, no.” 

“Not _for_ me, Potter, _with_,” but Boris’s energy has deflated at being yelled at, his face grown concerned as though this were a domestic spat and not a gilded invitation to break the law thrown back in his face. “You will not even hear me out?”

“No, it’s fucking illegal, are you serious right now?”

“Illegal for what? Who is hurt from this, what is stolen? Nothing. We are just selling art, good art into people’s homes - they would be lucky to have your art.”

“Stop, just. Stop fucking selling me.” He’s not going to lie, not anymore. He doesn’t - that’s not his life anymore. He stands up, his chair screeching in protest against the wooden floor, and swipes all of his tools into his briefcase. He can barely breathe, he can barely look up at Boris, he can barely reflect on how absolutely idiotic he must have looked these last few weeks. “This is so fucked up. You - it wasn’t a coincidence that you found me. Was it?”

Boris just looks at him, stony faced. “Potter,” he says, and that’s all Theo needs to hear.

“Fuck.”

From the sounds of it, Theo knocks over the coat stand with the force of his pulling his coat and scarf quickly from it, but he doesn’t even turn to confirm it. He takes the stairs two at a time, each half-jump jarring his knees, a punishment he deserves. He reimagines every grin he’s ever heard through Boris’ voice differently, each one tinged with motive, each one designed to play him. 

It’s only when he’s pulling the gloves onto his hands that he realizes he’s left the painting behind. He stops on the street, his feet turning him in a one-eighty he knows he shouldn’t be making, and forces himself to turn the full three-sixty and keep walking. There isn’t a chance he’s going back there, not even for the Bazille. God knows what Boris will do with it, god knows who’ll take the bait.

\--


	5. Chapter 5

Theo throws himself into his work after Boris’s job offer, though out of spite or a genuinely new appreciation for the canvases that cross his desk he’s not sure. Maybe it’s the recent dip in commissions, less of a backlog of work to do is bad news for the future, but for the present it means Theo can pay particular and thorough attention to the restoration at hand. He lets his work consume him like he hasn’t since he first began, pulling ten to twelve hour days just swabbing off dirt from a portrait or repairing splits in a frame or filling in hundreds of patches in a landscape’s sky. And maybe he’s doing it because if he’s too exhausted to keep his eyes open as he climbs the stairs to his apartment, then it means he doesn’t turn to his replicas for something to do. 

It’s two weeks of silence from Boris’s end and two weeks of nonstop work until all of his current commissions are finished and Theo finds himself twiddling his thumbs, a new influx of paychecks from his work slipping through his fingers like sand because he still runs the books at Hobie’s, his name still tied to the accounts at the banks, and if he’s not selling for Hobie anymore, he still feels like he has to do something. When he drops by for their weekly dinner, he stuffs a deposit slip in his pocket and says nothing. Hobie pretends not to notice, patting at his pockets for minutes longer than necessary to ensure he has his keys and his wallet. There’s something comforting in the routine. At least Hobie buys dinner, takes him to their usual, a place Theo wouldn’t be caught dead bringing Boris, not just for the scene Boris might cause but because this part of his life still feels locked up, safeguarded away. Not that it matters anymore, what Boris might do or where Theo might take him.

“You doing all right?” Hobie says casually, all of his focus on his steak and not the frown that paints dark colors across Theo’s face. For all that Hobie’s always seemed to leave him alone, minded his own business, never asked any real questions, he still probably sees everything. The judgment calls on whether to address it usually work in Theo’s favor, though.

“Of course.”

“You seem blue lately.”

“I’m working on Monet,” Theo jokes. Though it isn’t funny, Hobie still gives him a small grin, an indulging noise of amusement in the back of his throat. The judgment call is against Theo tonight, but he stays silent, trying and failing to stab his asparagus with his fork until he gives up and drains what’s left of his vodka sour. Hobie watches the cup, not him, the press of his lips together saying everything he doesn’t say aloud. Usually they share a nice bottle of Malbec together, but Theo’s foregone it, on his third tonight and waving their waiter down for another.

They’re quiet until Theo’s drink is swapped out, each of them planning their next offensive to reach their individual goals. Hobie starts first, “You’ve been keeping late nights.”

Theo frowns at him. “How do you know?”

“I can see your studio lights on from the street.”

“You shouldn’t be outside so late.”

“Dr. Morehouse said I need to walk more. Twenty minutes of cardio a day.”

“I think she meant in the daytime,” Theo says dryly, one edge of his lips tipping up into a smile. The easy patter of jokes typically means Theo’s winning, edging themselves to a level of comfortable where they couldn’t possibly discuss serious things, until Hobie pulls out a new trick.

“Have you been to see Mrs. Barbour lately?”

“No, I - ” He hasn’t seen her since he and Kitsey broke off their engagement, when she’d patted at his wrist and said, apropos of nothing, or so Theo thought at the time,  _ I’m sure you understand _ , and Theo had said he did, but he didn’t, because in the end it meant he lost her too. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Hobie leans in, his voice dropping even quieter than the already quiet level it sits at, his utensils abandoned on his plate just to confirm all of his attention is on Theo. “Look, Theo, I worry about you - ”

“You don’t need to,” Theo cuts in, but Hobie just keeps talking over him, as though Theo hadn’t made a sound.

“ - cooped up in that apartment alone, with your broken heart - ”

“My heart is not broken,” Theo mutters and takes a drink.

“ - instead of toasting to life with your friends and a good bottle of wine that you drink to savor and not to lose yourself at the bottom of,” Hobie finishes pointedly - as pointedly as he can manage while still soft spoken.

Theo’s fine, really, because the drinking’s nothing, not compared to college, when he’d sold thousands of dollars in furniture, maintained a full load of courses, and interned ten hours a week, all the while blitzed out of his mind. He deflects. “There was - I had a friend. A client, really, but I thought he could have been - anyway. It didn’t work out.”

“What happened?”

There are immediately too many answers to that question that Theo can’t say out loud.  _ He was a criminal. He was a con artist. He was too much like me.  _ “He was an asshole,” he settles on.

“Well,” Hobie says seriously, with the weight of a pep talk soon to follow, but it seems he’s reached his limit tonight. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Theo doesn’t want to talk about Boris anymore, doesn’t want to think about him, doesn’t want anything to do with him the same way he doesn’t actively squeeze lemon juice into papercuts - he’s not a glutton for punishment. He doesn’t imagine Boris is going to be the one to squeeze the lemon, though. One day, like Boris knew Theo was lonely, like he knew Theo didn’t have any new clients or projects, there’s three missed calls from Boris. No voicemails, like hopeful shots in the dark he knew weren’t going to hit the target anyway. Theo tells himself it’s not still the hurtful prick of realizing Boris was only orbiting Theo in hopes of a job.

He doesn’t return the calls, anyway, because he starts getting emails from a Peter McAllister, inquiring about Theo’s services for a painting found in his mother’s office, a deteriorating frame and an unintelligible signature on the back. It’s a big commission, Mr. McAllister asking for the standard patch-up alongside a new mounting and frame, a write-up of anything Theo can find about the artist. Mr. McAllister signs off the email stating that he hasn’t had the chance to take photos of the canvas yet but he’s visiting New York from Chicago on business and could he stop by the studio? The prospect of a large project that would likely bring in a few thousand dollars blinds Theo to the lack of photos or explanation about the work, but he figures it can’t be any worse than some of the canvases that he was promised “were in fine condition” only to have them be fraying and rotting off their frames in reality. 

And if Theo sets up a few of his replicas near the entrance of the studio to prove his skills, then Mr. McAllister would be none the wiser. Theo is finished setting up a tasteful but seemingly casual spread of sketches and a half-finished Eakins to the left of his work table when the bell above the door dings quietly. 

The pleasant smile Theo’s constructed hundreds of times falls off his face as soon as he rounds the corner to greet Mr. McAllister only to see a familiar black peacoat and head of dark curls stepping over the threshold. Boris has a folder tucked under one arm.

Theo looks down at him, irritated. “You’re Peter McAllister?”

“What you want me to do, Potter, you dodge my calls.”

“Some people would take that as a hint.”

“I am not some people.” Boris brushes past him into the studio before Theo can stop him. They both very well know that Theo won’t have anyone coming in for the next hour, anyway, this time blocked off for the Peter McAllister from Chicago that doesn’t exist. 

“I’m not going to--” Theo begins as Boris unceremoniously dumps his folder onto Theo’s work desk and what spills out is not a canvas, not another fake, but a stack of papers, receipts and invoices and shipping labels. 

“Let me apologize,” Boris says as he turns around, one hand pressed over his heart. “For how I treated you. Did not mean to spring my work on you like that. I am sorry if I offended you, or scared you off; was not my intention. If you do not want to work for me that is fine, of course, I never should have asked you like that. Please.”

“You shouldn’t have asked me at all. You shouldn’t have - you shouldn’t have come back. This is my business. This is my  _ life _ . All I have is my reputation, and I can’t - I can’t do this with you. I can’t be seen with you.”

“I have reputation, is good one. Just ask Peggy at Gardner.”

“You know Peggy?”

“And Sue at Arthur Ross and Mark at Hill-Stead. I deal art. Is legitimate business. The rest is… side interest, merely. Supplement. I have good reputation, I make good money. And your reputation is solid. If not small.” When Theo levels him with a look, Boris puts his hands up. “When was your last commission, do not lie to me. I am not being mean, just honest. They like you, they think you do good work. And you are under radar, you don’t work with MoMA, the Met. This is why I wanted you.”

That feels like another squeeze, another sting. He’s too small-time to be taken seriously by anyone other than a criminal, who’s not only got Theo on the hook but all of his best patrons, all falling victim to his scheme. “Fuck you.”

Boris looks up at him, confusion molding his features. “What is this? This anger. So you don’t want job, so what? You are acting very strange, just tell me what is this.”

Theo can’t think of anything more mortifying than admitting the truth out loud -  _ you hurt my feelings, they’re tender to the touch and you just keep gripping at them _ . Small world, Boris had said, conveniently too small. He doesn’t do vulnerable, he hasn’t for years, but Boris found a way to pry him open and stain his insides, and the extraction is proving painful. “You said - you remembered me from school. You didn’t know me at all, but. You said you liked me.”

“Yes? So?” Boris is looking at him like he’s crazy. “If you treat everyone who likes you this way, it is no wonder you don’t have girl. You are lucky, I am resilient. Very used to taking beating and standing back up. I am very good friend, what do they say - riding and dying, you’ll see. Come, look at this, I wanted to show you.”

Theo doesn’t move, can’t move. After all this, Boris considers them still friends, maybe because he’s eager to keep up the con, or maybe what he’s known of Boris has a kid has still rang true to now - Boris doesn’t do things he doesn’t want to do, Boris doesn’t know people he doesn’t want to know.

Boris is gifted at speaking at length with or without Theo’s contribution, and he continues without acknowledging the argument raging in Theo’s head, “You know I fired our previous artist. He had more equipment than he knew what to do with and I figured some of it would be put to better use here. Look, look! All of this, getting delivered here next week. Some are brand new.”

Theo finally steps forward to look at the scattered papers. It’s a variety of top-of-the-line conservation equipment and tools, order forms for brand new foam cutters and hand-held steamers, a new heated table, new light mounts. Some of it Theo doesn’t even know how to use, never in a million years could have imagined being able to afford for his projects: a new heated table with humidification and vacuum attachments for $20,000, heated spatula and air pen kits for $5,000, new portable mounting easels for $10,000 each. 

“Did you steal these?”

“Potter,” he laughs, “they do not give receipt for stolen goods.” 

Theo gives him a dark look. “You’re not providing provenance with your forged art?”

Boris waves that away. “Look, look, I have every one, is all paid for. It is for you. Please.”

“Boris, I can’t accept these,” Theo balks, the only places that have this equipment are collections in major museums, not independent conservation offices, god, Theo’s going to get fucking robbed for equipment that, despite what Boris says, is still most likely stolen, or at the very least paid for with blood money, anyway.

“Yes, yes!” Boris insists with a surprising amount of force, stacking the papers and pushing the folder into Theo’s arms. “Consider it a gift. My deepest appreciation for your skill can only be matched by the best equipment, toys my artist did not deserve to have in the first place! I cannot think of a more deserving studio to have it all.” 

“Boris, I  _ can’t _ accept all this.”

“You can.” 

Theo looks from Boris to the stack of papers in his hands and back to Boris. This is what takes his business to the next level, this is what has him taking bigger jobs he’s been turning away because he didn’t have the right materials, couldn’t make the deadlines, couldn’t prove himself to be anything more than  _ small-time. _ There’s a catch here that Boris isn’t tell him but they both understand: that if Theo accepts all of this then it means he can be bought. It means Boris can keep bringing him works to assess. But also it means Theo makes his and Hobie’s rent next month. It means a means to an end. 

“I won’t work for you,” Theo says slowly. Boris nods, like that’s understood. “And I won’t do your assessments for free.”

Boris nods again. “Of course, I will always pay for your services! No strings here, Potter, just had nowhere else to put all this. I want you to have it, truly, and for you to accept my apology. Your advice on our works has been priceless, I cannot afford to lose you as a resource over my badly-timed proposal, is all.” 

Theo hums, still feeling like a fish considering a worm on a hook, the folder in his hands feeling like a hundred pounds. Boris is watching him with wide and gentle eyes that are too much to match, so Theo drops his eyes and carefully memorizes the name and address of the receiving business on each of the packing slips for future research. It feels like he’s already said yes, but he can feel Boris waiting for him to say it explicitly, like he’s wired and the police are on the other end of it.

“Theo,” Boris says and puts his hands on either side of Theo’s neck. His hands are calloused, but gentle, warm in spite of the cold outside, and are able to convince Theo to look up at him. “I need you.”

“You need me?”

“Yes,” Boris says simply, like the word itself isn’t a riptide. Theo’s already been pulled under by him, and if the last few weeks, few months, have indicated anything, he won’t be breaking through to the surface any time soon.

Theo inhales slowly. “Okay.”

Boris perks up like a puppy, grin growing on his face before he can help himself, “Okay?”

“Yeah,” Theo sighs, smacking the folder against his left palm. “Thank you.”

Boris is grinning wickedly, tension broken or at least being ignored, now. “I also know you needed new easels anyway, ha! Propping up canvases on wooden Hobby Lobby stands like some fucking art classroom, I’m surprised you have not been run out of business yet.” 

“Fuck off,” Theo replies with an eyeroll and throws the folder down onto the table. 

When he turns from the table, he finds Boris at the front of the studio, studying the paintings Theo has displayed for him. “These are beautiful. Mr. McAllister is very impressed.”

“Shut up.” 

“Still at mine.” Boris looks over his shoulder back at Theo. “You will have to come get it yourself.”

Time reverses itself in front of him, like maybe that’s what he’s wanted all along - not to be forgotten by Boris but to be taken back into his fold, righteous indignation all but forgotten. Theo isn’t a good man, he can never pretend to be, and it’s not just about Boris’ paintings, it’s not just about  _ his _ painting.  _ He’s too much like me _ , Theo had thought, and if Boris had noticed, he either kindly didn’t say, or worked this whole thing into existence because of it. They’re a pair of criminals separately and together.

\--


	6. Chapter 6

It’s not that Theo’s expecting a welcome packet to come through the mail with the rules and regulations involved in joining an underground criminal enterprise, but he does expect there to be some difference in his life in the before and after of willingly agreeing to become an accessory to fraud. He certainly doesn’t expect there to be an air of  _ business as usual _ , Boris dropping by during his fucking office hours with a painting tucked under his arm and an easy grin on his face that feels the direct opposite of anxious frown permanently set to Theo’s face.

“Don’t you have a place we can meet? Something more - involved? Instead of my studio?”

Boris laughs at him, not exactly kind, and says, “You want to haul your equipment down to Astoria every time we must do work? This is even more shady, no?”

“So there  _ is _ a place,” Theo says, but Boris never answers yes or no.

He locks himself in his bathroom just before each of their meetings, hands shaking too much to even consider working on his newly recovered Bazille, as though separating himself just from the act of painting could do anything to lessen the severity of the crimes he’s committing. He unsticks the tin of Valium from where it lives tucked up behind the toilet’s stained tank and pops a few in his mouth, swallowing dry rather than sticking his face under the faucet. Then he moves to pace from side to side in the lobby of his studio as he waits. It’s always the same routine, it never gets easier. Even though Boris walks in and Theo’s lungs remember how to breathe, and Theo grins because Boris’ own are contagious, and he thinks he can do this, just for a little while longer, just for another hour, as he has scheduled his first client appointment in weeks. It’s not as if it’s hard work, or particularly long work. In fact, it’s almost insulting.

The Cézanne Boris brings him is stylistically perfect but technically sloppy, a version of his 1901  _ Pyramid of Skulls _ that was completed with chalk pastels and graphite instead of Cézanne’s standard watercolor or oil paints. Theo can’t tell if it’s something Boris is trying to pass off as genuine or just as a practice round, but either way Theo only has to look at it for a few seconds before he knows it was never actually made by Cézanne. 

Theo pinches the bridge of his nose under his glasses, squeezing his eyes shut against the sudden wave of exhaustion that rolls over him. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what causes it - Boris, a self-professed criminal having made Theo’s studio a regular stomping ground, or maybe it’s this one fake in particular, a study of Cézanne’s last years done without any regard for the context of his life at the time, like writing a book report without actually having read the book. 

It hurts Theo specifically, the pain stomping through his memory and yanking up an old box that Theo had long since filed away. Looking at the bastardized Cézanne, Theo’s own desperate studies are unkindly unveiled, left vulnerable without its temperature control, its direct exposure to sunlight. He might not have reached his fingers so close as to brush the shroud of death, the way Cézanne had, but he nevertheless tried. He nevertheless understood. And Boris doesn’t. Theo wants to shake him -  _ You’ve lost your mom, don’t you get it? _ But maybe Boris doesn’t. Maybe Boris only ever skims the surface, fingers trailing gently over the water, but never dives in. Nevermind that Theo always feels like he’s drowning.

“This is awful, Boris,” Theo says bluntly, looking up. 

Boris looks caught between surprised and crestfallen, not moving closer as he usually does to ask more specifics about Theo’s diagnosis. “It is?”

Theo slouches back in his stool, nudging the piece away from him, he doesn’t even want to fucking look at it. “Cézanne’s skull studies took place in his last years. His mother died in 1897 and he started working on images of death in earnest after that. This period of his, those works…” Theo shakes his head and swallows around a tight feeling in his throat. “These copies you keep bringing me? They’re so bad, frankly, that they feel disrespectful.” 

“You think you could do better?” Boris snaps and Theo doesn’t know if he’s baiting him or if it’s a genuine question. 

The sharpness of his remark takes a minute for Theo to process, like the seconds between a cut and the blood seeping out and then it starts to bleed. “Boris, did you make this one?”

The only reaction Boris gives away is a twitching muscle in his jaw and Theo huffs a humorless laugh. “You fired your forger and now you’re making them?”

“Well, the man I offered job to turned it down,” Boris bites. He holds out his arms, silver rings glinting. “And I have studied his copies long enough. Cannot be so fucking hard to do if you are doing them for fun.”

“Except yours are shit.”

Boris shrugs. “Have sold two already, so. Criminals do not seem to think they are shit.”

Whether Boris is pressing Theo’s buttons intentionally or not, Theo can’t tell, but it’s working anyway. Implying Boris’s reproductions and Theo’s are anywhere close to being on the same level feels like Boris is slowly filing down Theo’s teeth with a dull nail file. Every other moment with him is a contradiction, like the tenderness of  _ I need you _ might have been a passing feeling, like hunger - once sated, forgotten. “Criminals might not, but an art conservator would. A museum curator would. Any professional could look at this and tell you it’s a fake in five seconds.”

“Not if you pay them enough to look less,” Boris says, the sharp heat of his words cooling quickly to something icy, calculated. 

Theo turns away from him, massaging at his chest as though he could soothe the wild beating of his heart like a startled horse. They’re going to get caught; he knows it with a deep, ugly, unyielding certainty, and he’s not even helpless to the fact. He knows better than this, but Boris can’t know he knows better than this, can’t know that Theo’s spent more than half of his life on the run from the law while standing perfectly still, the law unaware they should give chase. There’s a moment where he thinks he might be better than Boris at this, if only because Boris doesn’t seem to care and Theo can only care deeply, fixated with his whole body. It’ll take anyone roughly a minute to connect them, as tangled as they are now.

“I can’t do this.”

“Potter.”

Theo can’t figure out how Boris sounds when he says Theo’s name like that - bewildered or betrayed or cautious or dismissive. There’s entirely too much put into one word that isn’t even his name but still somehow means  _ him _ , encompasses everything they are together. Whatever it is, it’s not enough. 

“I can’t be associated with this. Not that I’d - you can’t use my name, you know that.”

“Of course,” Boris says, edging on offended.

“But if you’re doing this kind of work, people are going to start to notice. The wrong person will notice. You’re going to get caught, and then I’ll -  _ fuck _ ,” Theo cuts off, pressing at his chest again. He’s too fucking grounded for this conversation, for any of it. He has to be separated clear from his body, observing his life like an outsider, like Ebenezer fucking Scrooge, if he’s going to have this conversation, and there isn’t a thing hidden in this studio that’ll give him that.

“Who is going to know?”

“I’ll know,” Theo says, and he doesn’t realize it’s a test until Boris passes it. Until Boris gets in his face, his big brown eyes catching Theo’s under the furrowed brow working double time as both annoyed and serious. 

“Fine.  _ Fine _ . We will forget the Cézanne, okay? I will burn, in big pile of rubbish where it belongs, flames as high as building, okay? Does this make you happy? Are you happy?”

Theo can’t even say yes. Boris takes his silence as one anyway, clapping at Theo’s shoulder and squeezing his fingers. “You need coffee. Irish coffee. Your family is Irish?”

“German. I think. Maybe.” 

“German coffee, then,” he says, grinning, and takes it upon himself to start fiddling with the coffee maker in the back until he’s produced a black coffee - not Irish or German - maybe because that’s what he knows Theo drinks or maybe because he thinks Theo needs a smooth slap to the face. Nevermind that Theo knows drinking coffee this late in the afternoon makes him feel like he won’t sleep for a week. 

While Boris packs his work away swiftly and silently, Theo sips at his coffee and calms down in increments, each vertebrae in his spine relaxing until that gives permission for the rest of his muscles to slowly relax from high alert. There’s a thought dancing at the tip of Theo’s tongue, to formless to articulate just yet.

“You can’t replicate a painting that’s already hanging in the Tate, you idiot.”

Boris just holds his hands up and shrugs. “Criminals don’t often frequent art museums. How do they know?”

“Google.”

Boris lets out a sharp bark of a laugh, tilting his head one way, then the other, like  _ fair is fair _ . He watches Theo closely, coffeeless Theo notices for the first time. “I am working on a Gauguin now.”

Theo makes a noise in disbelief between a laugh and a scoff, swiping a hand slowly down his face, but Boris just shakes his head. “Proving to be challenging. I was hoping I could mimic his sketches, sell those for couple grand. Constructing painting of his from scratch would be, ah, probably risky.”

“So don’t do it,” Theo presses. He really doesn’t understand the logic here, why Boris keeps picking artists that are the hardest to replicate. Theo has picked artists that were a challenge to copy, sure, but never with the intention of it being sold on the black market as an original. Never with high stakes like that. Boris himself had gotten on Theo about the  _ life _ in these paintings, like they were the password to opening up Theo’s trust, and he doesn’t even have the decency to try to put that life on the canvas. 

Boris waves a dismissive hand, like simply to  _ not  _ isn’t an option. “Buyer wants a Gaugin. The only reason I am in New York this weekend is for research. His exhibit now at MoMA.” 

“You can’t copy a Gauguin,” Theo finally says, pressing on before Boris can speak. “Not that you  _ shouldn’t _ but that  _ you, _ Boris,  _ can’t _ .  _ You  _ can’t just sit down and put together a genuine-looking Gauguin. You don’t have the skills.” 

Boris raises his eyebrows. “But you do, Potter.”

Theo blinks at him, and the thing starts to take form in front of him. Then the bell to the workshop door chimes, signalling Theo’s 4:00, an often-impatient Wall Street hack who has gradually been selling off his grandmother’s estate. Theo’s saving grace that doesn’t like to be kept waiting, but Boris is still standing like he intends to hang around even with their understanding that Theo’s legitimate work comes first and foremost. 

“You need to go,” Theo clips, trying to herd Boris towards the back door like a stray cat, scooping up the - Theo doesn’t even want to call it a Cézanne - the reproduction and pressing it into Boris’ chest until his hands finally grasp at it. “Don’t make a Gauguin.”

“I’m going to make a Gauguin,” Boris says over his shoulder as he pushes open the door to the side alley.

“Boris!” Theo snaps, desperately trying to get him to leave while also trying to get through Boris’s thick fucking head. He won’t get caught. He can’t fucking do this - unless he can. “I’ll make you a Gauguin the way it should look, okay? I’ll make you one. Don’t try to do it yourself.”

“Promise?” Boris chirps, half-turned back eagerly but Theo’s already shutting the door in his face. 

The half-formed look of hope on Boris’ face haunts him all afternoon and into the night. Somewhere along the line  _ I can’t get caught _ became  _ if you want something done right _ . Because he can’t get caught, but that means doesn’t mean stop, it means be careful - he knows that one first hand. It means stack the deck with expertise dealt to one hand and ignorance dealt to the other. Criminals can’t be any more aware than Hobie’s clientele. 

He picks a Gauguin off Google at random, one of his earlier sketches that was never made into a proper painting as far as Theo knows, which is also why Boris keeps making mistakes. Theo is jittery and irritable, three lines of coke and boiling annoyance from this afternoon’s interaction, the audacity of it but also the stupidity -  _ criminals don’t often frequent art museums,  _ which. While true doesn’t excuse the sloppiness, the disregard for the very specific rules of the very dangerous realm that Boris is operating within. 

Gauguin’s strokes and style are simple enough to copy, Synthetism one of the easier post-impressionist styles to copy when Theo isn’t sober because it’s all just mimicking shapes and colors in the same steps that Gauguin did. He picks a sketch of a young boy that seemed would be easy to transfer into a painting, large swatches of basic colors added on top of each other until it starts to mimic the style of portraits Gauguin completed in Tahiti. By the time it’s finished, the cocaine and anger have worn off, replaced by the calm routine of applying final strokes exactly reflecting Gauguin’s brushwork, the highlights of the eyes and the shadows of the cheekbones. 

He mails it to Boris two days later when the paint is dry, part of him hoping that if Boris has the painting himself it will deter him from “visiting” Theo’s studio to study his canvases anymore. He attaches a note to the cloth-and-bubble-wrapped canvas:  _ THIS is what a Gauguin should look like.  _

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tomorrow is Amy's birthday, if you would be so kind as to [drop her a line,](https://foxesmouth.tumblr.com) and let her know how brilliant she is.


	7. Chapter 7

Radio silence is hard, like whoever said  _ no news is good news _ was clearly lying when they said it in the interest of self-preservation. He’d spent about a day feeling sorry for himself, sad to see his painting go, before he woke up in a panic over what he’d done. He spends an inordinate amount of time online trying to figure out if the post office x-rays their packages, if they can trace something back to Theo even if he didn’t put his information on the return address. Boris could be in jail right now, and of course Theo wouldn’t be his one phone call. He holes himself up in his apartment for five days, barely opening the door to accept the food he gets delivered because he couldn’t possibly go to the store, and waits in a constant state of mild panic. 

He knows this feeling better than any other he’s come across in his life - the extreme guilt of knowing you’ve done something wrong, with the best or worst intentions, and the extreme fear that you’ll have to reap what you’ve sown. He’s lived with it so deeply that it almost feels like a fact he’d find written on his passport. Name: Theodore Decker. Place of Birth: New York. Eye Color: Brown. Inescapable and deeply intrinsic feeling in gut: extreme guilt. He can dull it, but he can’t mute it entirely - but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

Theo’s smoking a joint in the tub at 3 am when Boris texts. He’s on the more uncomfortable side of hot, whole body feeling like a singular heartbeat, and the weed isn’t helping, his head swimming, and he presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, dark reds and oranges swirling behind his eyelids. He stays like that until he’s almost convinced he doesn’t exist anymore, melted down to a singular throbbing pain. 

And then Boris, rips him out of it with a single text:  _ 15000 _

Theo reaches for his phone on the stool next to the tub and frowns around joint in his mouth when he taps back two question marks instead of something critically embarrassing like,  _ thank god you’re alive _ . Boris replies almost immediately with  _ 18. _

_ what? _

_ ur gauguin  _

Theo’s too fucking high for this, about to put his phone back down if only because he’s not really sure it’s real, but then the Facetime chime starts up. 

“Boris, what the fuck,” Theo says when he picks up. He puts the phone face-up on the stool so Boris can only see the ceiling and stubs out the joint in the ashtray next to it. From what he can see, Boris is holding his own phone about an inch away from his face. 

“Potter!” Boris whispers excitedly. “Your Gauguin! He is at twenty three thousand right now - twenty five!”

It takes a few beats for Theo to finally understand what’s happening. “Boris. Are you  _ selling _ that painting?” he says, loud and echoing in the bathroom, letting Boris shush him instead of saying anything else. 

“Yes! And it is doing very well.  _ Lot  _ of Gauguin fans here.” 

Theo sits in silent disbelief, staring up at the ceiling as Boris quietly chants numbers upwards. He’s caught somewhere between anger and shock, that he didn’t even notice the painting was gone let alone Boris  _ selling it without Theo’s permission as a genuine Gauguin  _ (and the tiny fleck of guilt that lives in the back of Theo’s brain reminds him, sharp and harsh, that hasn't it always been his goal, deep down? To create replicas that are as close to identical to the original as possible?) and an adrenaline shot of curiosity, of pride. Boris rings out, “Thirty thousand, Potter!” 

Theo feels frozen in shock, fingers clutching at the sides of the tub until the bones feel like they’re about to snap. The Gauguin he replicated in six hours while high on coke and annoyed at Boris just made them thirty grand. 

“Potter? Are you there?” Boris chimes from his phone on the stool. Theo finally picks it up, face-to-face with Boris on their screens and Boris grins. “Let me show you!” before Theo can protest Boris whips the phone around, a blurry image of a large hall with seats before he turns it back on himself. “Are you in the bath? Potter, are you  _ naked _ ?”

Theo ignores this, a hand crossing over his torso as though that’ll help the cause, because admitting  _ I was thinking of you _ is entirely too much to say. “You go to the auctions?” he asks incredulously.

“Of course. I have never been one to turn down free cheese and wine.”

“Unbelievable.” When Theo listens closely, the chatter around Boris doesn’t sound like English. “Where the fuck are you?”

“Munich.”

Theo nearly drops his phone into the water - not only had the painting been mailed, it had gone trans-atlantic. He knows better than most that airport security doesn’t necessarily recognize a priceless work of art when it scans one, but Customs, surely, was another story - the painting wasn’t exactly carry on-sized. Theo massages at his chest, trying to reassure himself that the further away from him it is, the safer he is. That seems pointless, though, when Boris seems fit to stand himself right next to it. 

“Aren’t you worried about getting caught?”

Boris snorts a laugh. “Proper wolf in sheep clothing, me. Nobody assumes that what they are buying is fake, let  _ alone  _ a seller of fake having the balls to show up! You should come next time.” 

“Absolutely fucking not.”

Boris shrugs. “If you please.” His eyes slant down with intensity, not looking at the camera but at Theo on his screen. “We must celebrate. I will take you to big dinner, keep your calendar open,” he says and hangs up.

Theo pulls the plug on the bath and sits there until the water drains fully, his hand still pressed against his chest to feel his heart beating out a mad rhythm unique to what it was beating when he’d first slipped into the tub. Thirty fucking thousand for a night’s work, more than he rakes in in a quarter. He could move his studio space to something larger, something that fits all of the insane equipment that Boris cluttered in the corner. He could pull Hobie up out of the red firmly, finally, forever, without compromising him. He could have things he wants instead of only things he needs, careless in the way the Barbours had been that he never could afford to be. He could - 

Theo hauls himself out of the tub, dries off swiftly and efficiently before tugging on a pair of boxers. He pads barefoot out of his room and upstairs, through a wooden door then a glass one, shivering slightly at the blast of chilled air keeping his equipment, his period paints, and his latest commission perfectly preserved. The heat of his idea, of his potential, snuffs the guilt out and protects him from the cold. He sits at his desk, bare chested and wide eyed, leaning hard into the wrong kind of high for this kind of work as though he already knows he can power through. 

He has an out-of-town client, friend of a friend of a friend who shipped Theo a William Merrit Chase portrait. Somewhere along the way the painting got glued to a slab of plywood and covered in a thick layer of polyurethane that’s cracking. The only option to restore the painting so far has been subjecting himself to at least a week with a scalpel to scrape off the cracking layer. Hobie had asked nicely if Theo could do the restoration as cheaply as possible, and Theo had agreed before he knew the state of the canvas. His only options to do it cheaply now were to either cut his own wages for the hours he’d have to sink into this or use cheaper materials to fix it, which ran the risk of the work not being up to the standard that the client was likely looking for.

He’s already given it three hours of scraping polyurethane from the edges before it became clear that any more scraping would pull up the majority of paint from the canvas, making Theo’s job of retouching less a matter of filling in some holes and more a job of repainting entire parts of the woman’s face. And that’s the same level of cluelessness that some of Hobie’s clients had; people who hand their paintings over to Theo expecting a full restoration but not realizing that, after hours of work, the painting may end up having more of Theo’s artistic hand on the canvas than the original artist. 

This is it.

He starts prepping a clean canvas, propping up the original Chase on a stand next to him and setting out his palette and paint tubes. He tells himself he’s not going to recreate this as the final product to give back to the client - it’s an exercise, just something to jumpstart his enthusiasm in instances like this, when he forgets why he ever wanted to move into restoration in the first place. And he knows it’s a lie.

He spends twenty minutes color matching, writing down copious detailed notes so he can do this again - so he can do this twice, specifically. It’s too easy for private collections to be replicated, knowing they won’t hit a museum for decades, if ever, so no one knows who has what, no one will ever put them side by side.

Self-congratulation isn’t in Theo’s nature, but eight hours of copying the painting stroke for stroke turns his new canvas into a skeleton even he’d have to pull his best tricks out to debunk. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t move but to prep and snort two lines of Ritalin to keep himself going. The sun is going down when he deems his first pass good enough, for Boris at least.

His eyes rest on a second stretch of canvas and six notebook pages of cramped scribbled notes before flicking back to the replicated Chase. He knows this is the greatest thing he’s ever done, a feeling edging at him from the side that takes a few moments to identify. It’s the closest he’s ever felt to being an artist. He sets the first canvas aside and pulls the second forward to start his prep, feeding on the knowledge that he can do better, that he can do more. 

\--


	8. Chapter 8

Boris’s studio is everything that Theo’s isn’t. Theo’s heated tables, meticulously-managed filing system and buckets upon buckets of brushes roughly organized by size, by hair type. Boris’s studio is the attic of his apartment building, giant stretches of tarp laid across the whole floor and buckets scattered around the edges of the room alongside empty beer bottles, old library art books, stray pieces of frames and wood piled in the corner. Something about it is calming, maybe homey, the chaos perhaps more reminiscent of the artists they work with than Theo’s clinical approach. 

Boris doesn’t seem to be aware that Theo’s even there, his attention instead turned to the giant canvas on the floor, soaked with pastel colors. It’s a Frankenthaler, or goddamn close to one, and Boris keeps kneeling to it like it’s a wounded deer, more gentle and cautious than anytime Theo’s ever seen him. Like it’s going to get up and run away. He’s got a pencil behind one ear and two cigarettes tucked under the rolled sleeve of his once-white t-shirt, and when he stands he balls a fist into the hem of it, leaving behind a smudge of turpentine. Theo wants to continue to go unnoticed and watch Boris tend to the canvas but it’s too late; Boris turns and his expression, etched deep with concern moments ago, breaks into a smile. “Potter!” 

Theo takes that as permission to approach, stepping until he toes the hem of the canvas. “Frankenthaler?” he asks, looking up for confirmation and Boris shrugs, leaning to pick up a stray rag from the floor to mop his hands with. “It’s beautiful.”

“Ah,” Boris sighs bashfully, flipping the rag around the back of his neck and staring hard at his feet. Theo knows Boris doesn’t believe him because Theo never believes anyone, either, when they compliment his work. “Her soak stains are unlike anything.” 

“So is this your wheelhouse, then?” Theo gestures widely. “Abstract expressionism?” 

“I tried to copy a Degas. Only once. Even Gyuri said it was shit,” Boris admits, “but these! Modern art! Pollocks and Rothkos and de Koonings? Where it is just a matter of matching stroke for stroke? I find them much easier to do.” He holds out his arms wide, palms up. “Plus! Matching paints for the twentieth century, so much cheaper. Saves me so much fucking money and time and heartache.”

“You do a good job,” Theo says gently. He’s never had the patience for modern art himself, the lack of a structure or form to follow the most frustrating and intimidating part of it. Instead it’s easier to focus on the minutiae of it all, the exact pigment, the sketched layers underneath. How people have looked and acted the same for literally hundreds of years and Theo just so happens to be able to capture it. Standing and studying Mrs. Barbour’s portraits for hours until they’re burned into his eyelids, until he understands every single stroke of it. But put him in front of a Jasper Johns and he might as well be blind. 

Boris is already shaking his head, though, moving close enough to poke a smudgy fingertip against Theo’s coat lapel. “No, no. You, my friend,” Boris says, firm and serious, “You must have been old master in your past life. Have never seen anyone come close. Ever.” He flaps a hand vaguely to the side of them, gesturing out into the wider world, “that fucking? Vigee Le Brun you did last week? The lady with blue hat? Stick that up in National Gallery today and nobody would suspect a thing. I swear to you!”

Theo smiles gently, stuffing his hands in his pockets and staring down at the pastel streaks on Boris’s canvas for a long moment. And then he carefully extracts the newspaper article from his pocket, hands it over to Boris wordlessly. He’s expecting at least  _ some  _ sort of reaction, his own mouth having gone dry and cottony when he read the headline  _ $9.3M Art Fraud Ring Busted in Brooklyn _ over morning coffee with a visiting client. It took every instinct of his to not immediately call Boris about it. The deep-seated paranoia that has remained tucked safely away at the back of his mind the last few months suddenly exploded into full-focus, worrying about phone taps or computer bugging if he was to ask about this electronically. Hell, he took two trains and a cab to get here and then walked around the long way to get to Boris’s studio in a sudden, chest-clenching panic that he was being followed. 

It’s a wave of exhaustion and confusion, then, when Boris skims the article and chuckles before crumpling the clipping into a ball and tossing it over his shoulder. “We are not that stupid, Potter,” Boris chirps. He shakes his head like it’s funny. “Nine million. Hardly worth the money to be printed on the front page.” 

“So that’s not us? At all?” 

Boris waggles a palm back and forth, undecided. “I have only worked with that group twice in past, used one of their curators in London for an inside deal. But that ring was based out of Brazil and I have not been ever to their headquarters. Only know those names in passing. Possible that them and us have used same insiders, yes, only so many to go around, you know! But the likelihood of that bust leading to us? Very slim. Very, very slim.”

It should be reassuring to Theo, but it’s not, the few art forgery roads in the world all seem to lead back to Boris in one way or another. Boris side-eyes him, half-grinning before he pulls the two cigarettes tucked in his t-shirt sleeve out and passes one to Theo. “Promise, Potter,” he says as he pats himself down for a lighter, locates it in the pocket of his jeans, “would not let you get wrapped up in a mess like that.”

Boris’ promise of protection means something, less like the assurance of a mob boss to a haberdasher while imposing giants that pass for men stand guarding the door. Maybe more like the childhood best friend who stands in front of the bully saying _ you’ll have to get through me first _ , if only because Theo could picture that for them, reshaping the image of their shared youth until he can see Boris, tall and thin and feral and grinning with the fight, standing in front of Theo with an arm reached back behind him to keep Theo at bay. That means something.

Theo pulls the turpentine-smeared rag from around Boris’ neck and tosses it onto the nearest counter before they both light up, Boris rolling his eyes because flammability means nothing to him in the grand scheme of things and Theo rolling his eyes back so that  _ I don’t want you to die today _ becomes masked in an easier to admit  _ I don’t want to die today _ . It’s about mutual protection.

“Now,” Boris says, smoke escaping through his lips. He moves for a desk in the corner. “Must not keep you from the only reason you came.” 

Theo slides the envelope into the same pocket in his jacket he always does, wordlessly, a different transaction from his first paycheck. 

“This is for you,” Boris had said, pride tinging his voice, as he slid a thin envelope across the table at dinner, Theo’s cut of the first thirty thousand.

Theo looked at it but couldn’t touch it, as though his fingerprints on the payout sealed his culpability and not the painting itself. “How am I supposed to explain something like this to the IRS?”

Boris had looked at him like he’s an idiot. “You are small business owner with many clients. I have included your PO with check, Potter, this is not first rodeo.”

Theo bristled, but pocketed the envelope quickly anyway. “Don’t forge my POs,” he warned, but couldn’t even force it to sound like a genuine threat. He had already been too busy thinking of all the things he could do with the money, how he could use it to scrape off the old and damaged parts of his life and replace them with a fresh coat of paint.

“It’s not the only reason,” Theo says, too late for it to feel like a natural progression of their conversation because Boris frowns for a long moment before he understands.

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to - ” To come, to see you, to see your studio, to make you make me feel better, to look through even the smallest window into your life - Theo can’t say any of them, so he says nothing. The truncated version is just as true either way. He wanted to.

Boris looks at him like he’s studying, uncovering something in Theo’s eyes that Theo might not even know he’s keeping buried. “Let me make you a drink,” he decides, and Theo nods, leaving off the hemming and hawing that would come in more polite company that it’s only 10.30 because by now Boris knows better than that. He clinks their bottles of beer together on his way back over to the canvas spread wide across the floor, padding in his socked feet in the same way Frankenthaler would. He forgoes the turpentine in favor of a paint roller to begin to mold the maroon paint the corner he’d been working on when Theo arrived.

He fits in this picture, Boris does, crouched and focused, making something out of nothing. Theo thinks he’s never seen Boris at work before now, any of their business-toned meetings reshaping to form themselves into purely social calls, if this is what Boris looks like when he’s working. When he cares.

“I don’t believe you.”

Boris raises his eyebrows over his shoulder at Theo, a silent question.

“That modern art is more cost effective.” Theo waves his drinkless hand. “I mean, I do believe that, it’s empirical, I know that better than anybody. But I think you like it. I think you like Frankenthaler. I’m calling bullshit on you.”

Boris touches a mock-offended hand to his chest. “On me?”

“Yeah, on you - how does that feel?”

He thinks on it, turning back to his work, and answering to it instead of to Theo. “Not great.”

“You said you didn’t have a favorite artist.”

“Yes.”

“But you like this.”

“Yes,” Boris says again, but this time it seems harder for him.

“Why?” Theo asks even though he can already tell Boris doesn’t want to answer. Boris is a block of ice Theo is always chipping away at, trying to fashion a fully formed person out of, but his chisel gets stuck and his hammer won’t drive with every deflection, shrug of his shoulder,  _ this, that, is nothing _ . Sometimes Boris looks at Theo and it feels like he can see everything, and sometimes Theo looks at Boris and it feels like Theo’s never seen his face. “Boris. Indulge me.”

Boris looks up at the ceiling, Theo’s eyes following his throat stretching taut and his jaw somehow shaping stronger, sharper. He settles the handle of his paint roller on his thigh, paint slowly sliding down to inevitably drip on his jeans, but he doesn’t seem to care. “Sometimes they look like my dreams,” he starts and Theo holds his breath. “Is just colors sometimes. Shapes, impressions, never firming into people, places, words I can understand. I dream like this, even when I was a kid, maybe even when I was a baby, and used to think it meant nothing. Like screensaver on old computer at school - you remember the ones? Black, pulsing colors, meaningless shapes. I used to think of nothing, but some days, now, is the only thing I can think about. Trying to figure out what it means. What I want to say to myself, but can’t.”

Boris looks down at the canvas again, moving the roller that by some stroke of luck hasn’t spilled to resume his work. He doesn’t look embarrassed to have said it, and he doesn’t take it back, but the admission changes the air quality in the room, thinner like they’ve transcended to a higher elevation. 

“You don’t sleep much.”

Theo startles, but he shouldn’t. Boris remembers too much about him, but Theo can’t get used to it. He feels like he shouldn’t get used to it. “I - no. I don’t.”

“Do you dream?”

Every night, long and exhausting dramas that keep him alternately trapped in a still life, posing for a painting that will never complete, or spinning the world around him like a carousel that’s going too fast for him to hold onto something, too fast to see the sights. He wakes up with a start, oxygen clawing roughly at his throat like it’s trying to prove he’s still alive, he’s made it through the night, in the most visceral way possible. He wakes up so shattered he wonders if the few hours of sleep made any difference at all.

“I wish I didn’t.” Theo shakes his head, he won’t let Boris pivot away. He walks over to Boris’ line of sight, pulling up a chair and settling a close but respectful distance from the canvas. “Is that what started you in art, then? The dreams.”

“Back in Vegas,” Boris starts, his lips tipping up like he’s about to deliver a punchline, “I stole a painting.”

Everything within Theo’s body stills - his breath, his blood, his thoughts, his self-preservation instincts. Theo crystalizes in the timespan of one of Boris’ patented beats tucked into his stories to build tension, but Boris presses on, none the wiser, eyes only for his work. 

“In penthouse suite at the Wynn. Small thing, but it looked expensive, so I took it, shoved it down my pants, and rode elevator back down to lobby. Thought I was very cool, so slick, painting size of dick in my pants - was very big, surprised I did not get caught.”

“Ha ha ha,” Theo drones just to watch Boris grin all the way. He does, and it helps Theo slowly thaw.

“Thought he was tourist, you know, big high roller, rich but wouldn’t miss it. I had this fence that I was working with, small time guy, both of us trying to make it bigger, and he lands a potential buyer. I go to meet him, neutral location, very carefully planned, this, was so proud of myself. Turns out buyer was the fucker I stole the thing from in the first place.” He laughs like even now he thinks it was just a small bit of rotten luck, a world-too-small coincidence.

“Fuck.”

“Mm. Anyway. Got caught. Got punished. Got a job.”

“What?” Theo’s not sure which part of that to unpack first, but Boris decides for him.

“I have very good sales pitch, you know this, I talk talk talk, guy almost forgets I stole it from him in the first place, gives me a job on the spot, and lets me in on a little secret.” He finally looks up at Theo. “Turns out it was a fake. Who knew?”

\--


	9. Chapter 9

Theo turned his phone off shortly after the text from Pippa came through, her standing in front of  _ Girl with a Pearl Earring  _ with her scarf wrapped around her hair, her mouth quirked and eyes shining in a smile that doesn’t fit match the painting, but she’s always been too unique to be a reproduction anyway. He should have said something nice, but he’s been stuck for days on  _ who elopes to the Netherlands _ . He knows Hobie will say something on his behalf anyway, Theo having begged off the trip because of work.

It’s bullshit, which he knows and they don’t - Boris isn’t ready for his next few paintings, so he has them away in storage, and still he’s working around the clock for him. Because it means something, it gives him a purpose, sets him on a course instead of leaving him drifting for years, his rudder broken and he can’t even care enough to fix it on his own. He lives for Boris’ texts from the auction house, the action described with half the letters missing, interspersed with a series of escalating sums of money. 

It’s not even about the money. Theo’s never had an excess of it for any part of his life, but has never lived without his needs met, finding if you live long enough without getting the things you want, you eventually stop wanting. He wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what he wanted in any case - certainly not  _ things _ , certainly not  _ people,  _ somehow both of those are too cursed or temporary to put your hopes on.

He couldn’t tell anyone why he does this, the reason is dark and unknowable - not obscured but rather a void, empty and untouchable. In the rare moments that he sinks his hands into the emptiness, grasping desperately to pull something out that he can reckon with, all he can get his hands on is Boris.

He hears the doorbell chime in an endless stream, like someone is pressing down on it with no intention of giving up. 

“Dodging my calls, Potter, was beginning to think maybe you do not want me anymore,” Boris says when Theo eventually opens the door to him. It’s unclear whether Boris knows the depths of exactly how untrue that is. He holds a long, thin wooden crate up to his chest like it’s the entry fee, and it works.

“I was up in my studio,” Theo explains, which was not an invitation, but Boris takes it as one, moving to the stairs first and taking them two at a time until he stops up at the top, blocked by a locked door only Theo can open.

Theo presses around him, the two of them shuffling around in the tight corridor until Theo’s stopped in front of the door, the key burning into his hand from his squeezing as he realizes he’s about to invite Boris somewhere that no one else has been before. For preservation purposes, he has to guard the room carefully anyway, decrease the likelihood of contaminates - those sorts of things are easier to articulate than the fear of letting someone into his inner sanctum. But he lets Boris in anyway.

His music is still playing loudly from the radio in the corner, so he walks over and switches it off so he doesn’t have to look at Boris looking at everything, like he knows Boris is. So he doesn’t invite any questions. Boris can’t be surprised by the room, certainly, he’ll have to understand why it’s perfectly sterile, he’ll recognize all of the equipment he had delivered as part of his offering. That’s really all there is to it.

He can hear Boris across the room at one of the free desks, setting down his prize before saying, “I have a painting for you, come, come.” He’s already prying at the edges of the thin wooden top with a tool that he’s collected up from Theo’s stash without asking, loosening the nails as he slowly liberates the painting nestled within. It’s breathtakingly good, colors thick and vivid, something that was clearly made with confidence - the best of anything Boris has brought to him thus far. 

“Have you found another artist?” Theo tries not to sound hurt, but he doesn’t think he succeeds. Then he recalls the Frankenthaler. “Did you do this?”

“Of course not.”

The painting has a series of birds perched around a tree, hyper-realistic in the way Snyders was known for, with one fat parrot in the corner looking Theo in the eye as if to say,  _ I know what you’ve done.  _ Theo takes a step back, massaging at the twinge in his chest. “I - this is real?”

“Should hope so. Bought it in an estate sale in Antwerp, poor girl did not know what she had, I think, selling so low, unless it is fake. So. What do you think, Potter?” Boris turns a powerful grin on Theo, something almost made of confidence. And pride. Like a cat leaving a dead bird at your feet, expecting to be praised.

“It looks good. Really good. I’ll have to run the x-ray and the microscopy to confirm, but. Gut instinct, it’s real.”

“Well, I trust your gut.” Boris circles his arms around him, his hands pressed firmly to Theo’s stomach. “Not that there is much to it. Potter. Are you eating?”

“I’m fine.” Theo places his hands over Boris’, with the full intention of pushing away, until he catches how warm they are in contrast to Theo’s forever cold hands, victims of poor circulation. His fingers feel like the snow-damp sweaters he’d drape over the heater in the corner of his kitchen as a kid to dry up, always afraid they’d somehow catch fire even though his mom always swore it would be okay. 

Boris drops his hands before there’s the risk of fire, and Theo finds himself turning away from him. “So this is - this is part of your,” Theo cuts off and waves his hand, trying not to say  _ real job _ , but it’s clear that’s what he means.

Boris hums a yes. “You want to stay about 70% legitimate. The rest is. Eh.” He shrugs. “For Peter McAllister.”

“The dad from  _ Home Alone _ ?”

Boris’ eyes widen, his hands already going with excitement. “Yes! Have you seen this movie?”

“When I was a kid, yeah.”

Boris leans back against the desk, his eyes taking him somewhere Theo can’t follow, delving swiftly into the past without fear clutching at his every move to slow him. “Yes, me too. I watched this when I was, maybe, eleven years old? All weekend sitting inside, snowing, real American type white Christmas, only a black and white television to keep me company. It only plays these two movies, I think, first one, then second one, first, second. I watch these movies twenty times each, one weekend.”

“Didn’t your parents tell you to turn it off?”

Boris grins at him. “What parents?”

Theo understands. For him, it was old mob movies on TCM, long weekends where his dad and Xandra would disappear and forget to tell him that they got a room comped at the Flamingo for their troubles, never quite saying what their troubles were. He’d watched so much television then that he has no stomach for it now, doesn’t even own one. And Kitsey had thought they were gauche besides.

Boris nudges at him then motions to the  Géricault in progress.  “It’s looking good.”

“It’s fine,” Theo says, by which he means it’s garbage. “The others are better.”

“Where are they? Can I look?”

“They’re not here. I don’t keep them here.”’ For obvious reasons. For the news article Theo had once brought him. For the raid Theo keeps imagining will wake him up in the night, so he sits awake listening for any slam of the car door, any sound of boots on the ground. For the piece of mind that he gets with the rest of his heart locked away in the same place.

“No? Where are they?”

“Somewhere safe.”

Boris looks disappointed in him, but says nothing. Theo clenches his fists on and off at his sides, pressing until he can feel his nails digging in, too blunt to draw blood. There’s a lot he’s given Boris, but he won’t give him that. He feels his control fading quickly, the itch returning just by seeing Boris’ face. His words aren’t useful to Boris, talking isn’t going to get him anything. The work is.

“I’m going to get back to work.” He slips out of the room and into the bathroom down the hall, where he raises up to finger at the small tin box he keeps tucked on top of his medicine cabinet, behind the wooden flourish that forms a curved peak in the middle large enough to hide something. 

Theo’s line of Ritalin powder is barely up his nose before the bathroom door jiggles open, accompanied by Boris’s sharp bark of a laugh. “Potter, if you wanted to party, you should have said. I could get you something better than this, I promise you.”

“It’s for work.”

“Of course, yes, me too,” Boris says with extreme condescension. He taps at the side of his nose with one finger. “I am also using coke  _ for work _ .”

“Fuck off.” He shoves at Boris until he can close the door around him and flips the lock this time, berating himself for forgetting Boris’ utter lack of boundaries. He slaps the box back into place, knowing there’s no chance Boris has gone home, and proves himself right as soon as he gets back to the room. 

Boris has perched himself at Theo’s work bench, his laptop out and carefully placed so it doesn’t touch any of Theo’s sketches or tools. Theo doesn’t even bother wondering how he got in and out without the key. He settles down at his work bench as well and begins to trim a piece of charcoal.

“Let me take you to dinner.”

“No.”

“Potter.”

“I’m working.”

“I work too.” He gestures at the laptop and then begins to type on it, utter nonsense from the way his fingers move, just to prove a point.

“Whatever.”

While they work, he can feel Boris’s eyes on him, sharp and hard like a hawk; how much Theo wants him to makes him feel off-kilter, like he’s been shoved and his feet stumble, constantly trying to find his balance again but never able to find traction. He doesn’t know how to articulate it beyond  _ I want you but I don’t want you here _ , not when he’s like this, not when he’s been ambushed, not when he doesn’t have anything to show for himself.

Theo takes off his glasses and cleans them with his shirt hem just for something to do with his hands. He’ll have to give Boris something to do as well, just to stop the analysis.

“There’s a  Géricault exhibit at the Louvre through next year I’d kill to see in person. His brush strokes are incredibly difficult to get right just using internet searches. I’ve only ever seen his  _ Kidnapper  _ piece in person up in Massachusetts.” Boris is chewing the end of one of Theo’s pencils and nodding along, though his gaze has wandered down to Theo’s sketchbook. “Or even access to any of his archives would be helpful. If someone has a list of clientele he painted, maybe. If we can prove that he was commissioned for a portrait that isn’t in any museum, I’m sure we could sell for more.” 

“Paris,” Boris says, eyes flicking back upwards to Theo’s. “He has exhibit in Paris right now?”

Theo hums and leans forward to tap out the Louvre’s website on Boris’ laptop. “I’m sure you’ve got connections in Paris. Ask them to send me some photos of the sketches, if they can. It would be a huge help.”

Boris hums, cocks an eyebrow at Theo. “Shame you cannot see it in person yourself.”

“Yeah, it is,” Theo mumbles absent-mindedly, focus half-turned back to his sketchbook. He doesn’t even notice when Boris scoops up the laptop and leaves the studio, until the door closes with a decisive click. He looks back after it, startled, at the abruptness with which he’s gotten what he’s wanted, suddenly feeling cold on the other side of satisfaction.

It’s that night when Theo is brushing his teeth that his phone pings, a photo from Boris. Two boarding passes from Newark to Charles de Gaulle, dated for Monday evening. 

Theo stands up straighter, mumbling, “The fuck,” around the brush in his mouth.

Boris sends a string of emojis - an airplane, money with wings, a paint palette, a spoon, a croissant, a skunk, a ball of yarn, a zombie. There are some days Theo regrets buying him that iPhone. And then another blurry photo of a computer screen with a receipt for 2 admission tickets to the Louvre.  _ Ask n u shll receve!  _ Boris pings through once more.

_ I didn’t ask _ , Theo replies to which Boris responds with a shrug emoji and a fairy. 

Theo’s chest tightens at the thought of getting on a plane, walking into a museum as crowded as the Louvre. Should have just kept his mouth shut.

\--


	10. Chapter 10

Theo makes his way across the Atlantic only thanks to Boris’s incessant talking for the full flight and a heavy dose of Ambien to keep the sense memory at bay. In security, he’d been forcibly flashed back to being a kid again, flying into the desert to somewhere unknown, his fear battling the pill Xandra had given him and ending in a stalemate. 

When he’d left Vegas, coming home to New York hadn’t felt like returning to the scene of the crime, as much as it was. He’d been alone, fueled only by hope and something else - not determination, but desperation, perhaps, the sheer desperate need for all of this to succeed and no guarantees it would. 

At least this time Boris is with him, he has purpose, and an end in sight. Theo makes it to Paris unscathed, but unable to adopt the near vacation-level ease and excitement with which Boris greets the city. He steals glances out the window of the car Boris hired for them, masking his surprise that it’s Gyuri behind the wheel even over here, and tries to convince himself with each glance that maybe he could deserve this. He’s never been to Paris, but it still looks like an old friend, its ancient sweeping architecture immortalized forever in oils, the subject of Theo’s passionate study. He thinks of Pisarro’s painting of Montmartre, tucked away in the Met where Theo will never see it, and can’t think of a logical reason to recreate the view in person. 

Theo is, for some reason, half-expecting them to arrive at a hostel or a shitty apartment of one of Boris’s associates so he finds himself open-mouthed when their cabs pull up to an ornate hotel, Boris getting out and gathering up their bags (and Theo) like he’s been here a thousand times. Theo trails him like a lost child and stands dumbfounded, rumpled and exhausted in the lobby, while Boris checks them in with almost perfect French. 

The hotel room itself is like an apartment, bigger than the one bedroom Theo sank all of his money into when he’d stubbornly moved out of Hobie’s during a misguided attempt at autonomous living just after college. Theo drops his luggage at the curtain windows, gaping at the view, the Eiffel Tower blinking in the distance, lush parks, a shining golden statue of a man and his horse.

“Boris, this is too much,” he says.

“Is just enough, always worry, worry, worry with you, Potter,” Boris shouts from the other side of the kitchenette. When he rounds the corner, he’s holding two wine glasses in one hand and an uncorked bottle of red in the other. Theo’s brain sluggishly tries to come up with reasons not to drink - the Ambien, jetlag, tomorrow’s museum tickets - but there’s a full glass in his hand before he can open his mouth. 

After that, he remembers very little of the night, but being gently placed into a too soft bed, Boris picking at the buttons on his shirt and stripping it as Theo’s head rests on his shoulder, too heavy to ever consider moving again. “Where’s your bed?” he asks, the words thick and heavy in his mouth but still coming out close to English, so far as he can tell. 

“You’re in it.” Boris scoops up Theo’s bare legs and tucks them under the thick white duvet.

Theo’s head falls back onto the pillow, and he frowns up at the ceiling. “Where’s my bed?”

“Shh, Potter,” Boris says, like it’s a hypnotist’s trigger word that puts Theo right to sleep. 

The Géricault exhibit hall is mercifully almost empty on a Wednesday morning at 9:15, a group of art students camped out on the longest bench in the main hall and a few tourists milling around, but otherwise Theo feels suspiciously calm. Maybe it’s the clearly-marked exit signs or the leftover Ambien in his system or Boris’s reassurance this morning, joking as they got coffee, “On off chance you are victim of not one but  _ two _ major museum bombings, you probably deserve to die in a museum anyway.” 

So Theo steps into the exhibit hall with his sketchbook and silently accepts his fate. He lingers at the beginning of the exhibition, Géricault’s sketches too valuable to skip over, but Boris is already pacing ahead, scoping out the rest of the hall. The clip of his heeled boots echo like dropping a flashlight down a well, a measure of how far he can get away from Theo before he’s out of reach. It’s not too far, Boris’s clicking still audible from two or three gallery rooms away before he circles back to the beginning. 

“I may leave you here,” he says, and Theo doesn’t know if Boris is asking permission or just telling him, but he nods either way, already flipping open his sketchbook to copy down the figure outlines of the Géricault sketches on the wall in front of him. Boris lingers over Theo’s shoulder for a long moment, watching him sketch, before he pats him on the shoulder and heads out back to the main hall. 

Theo doesn’t know how much time passes, but after the sketch wall, he settles onto the opposite end of the bench from the class of art students with a full view of three of  Géricault’s most recognizable works. He knows it’s been at least a handful of hours, the art class having come and gone along with a couple of tour groups coming through the hall. His sketchbook by now is a mess of notes about spacing and line work and color palettes along the margins of his own sketches, copying the eyes and noses and mouths of Géricault’s subjects. 

He’s brought out of his reverie by a hand to his back that would have made him flinch if he hadn’t been fully convinced it is Boris - and it is, not come to collect him but to check on him. He rounds Theo to settle next to him on the bench, crossing one leg over the other in the picture of serenity, of someone who can manage to look at home everywhere he goes. Theo can’t relate. “Useful, yes?”

“Yes.” Theo looks over at him. “Thank you.”

“Anything you need,” Boris says, and it sounds like the truth. 

Boris orders them room service back at the hotel, Theo having skipped lunch without realizing it, which he’s no stranger to. Theo is grateful for the privacy, realizing as he’d walked through the crowded corridors outside into the crowded streets that he’s been exposed too long, stretched taut like a guitar string pulling and pulling until it nears its breaking point. He’s upset with himself for struggling, Paris is nothing compared to Manhattan, but it’s the compounding effect that has his hand shaking as he takes half-steady pulls from the joint Boris has managed to procure until he doesn’t feel anything at all. 

The only reason Theo agrees to go up to the hotel’s rooftop pool with Boris is because he’s high, something about marijuana and a too-warm room making him agreeable and soft like a swarm of bees getting smoked out. He doesn’t want to swim, making a point to leave the room still in his full suit and jacket to make it clear to Boris that he is  _ not _ going to get in the water. Boris either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, dumping the contents of his basketball shorts’ pockets onto the patio table (two lighters, two phones, another crumpled joint, a pack of Camels, a wallet with an Illinois driver’s license for  _ Peter McAllister  _ with Boris’ smirking face on it) before stripping off his t-shirt in one fluid motion. 

It’s the first time Theo’s seen him shirtless since fifteen at some house pool party and some part of Boris is the same lanky teenager, pale as death and jutting bones. But other parts are new. The pale slots of his ribs and pockmarks of past injuries, a smattering of pale pink scar tissue high on his collarbone, a winding tattoo of a snake crawling up from his hip and curling around the scar for what must have been a nasty burn on his shoulder blade. 

“Jesus, what was this from,” Theo asks, hand stretching out but not connecting with his skin, too far away. 

“Told you, I got caught,” Boris says casually, glancing at Theo over his bare, burned shoulder. “Haven’t been caught since, though.”

Theo closes his eyes to it, feels sick about it, not that it was ever his fault. He thinks for a moment what it would have been like to take Boris back to New York with him, to have kept him from tumbling into whatever long life of crime he’s clearly been steeped in, but then he stops. Remembers in the end they’re still here in the same place, doing the same thing.

Theo expects Boris to run and jump into the pool, cannonball straight in, but he’s deliberate, crouching at the edge of the pool until he slips in. Theo watches the knobs of Boris’s spine bend as he thinks about the shafts of arrowheads in Mantegna’s  _ Saint Sebastian. _ Thinks about the golden halo around the martyr’s head and the lights from the pool glinting off Boris’s wet hair. Thinks about how badly he wants some Doritos right now.

“Potter, come in! Water is… fucking freezing,” Boris cackles and Theo shakes his head, cupping his hands around the joint from Boris’s pocket to light it despite the noise of protest from the man in the water. Boris strikes the surface of the pool with a hard slap, sending a spray of water towards Theo. 

“Fuck, Boris!” 

“Come!”

They glare at each other for a few long moments before Theo sighs, leaning down to roll up his pant legs. He sits at the edge of the pool, calves in the water, and gestures to Boris with dramatically open arms,  _ happy? _

Boris perches himself against the edge of the pool next to Theo and hums, extending a wet hand upwards for a hit of the joint. He grins the answer,  _ very _ .

”You know,” Boris mumbles, head cradled in his crossed arms on the concrete edge of the water, “three dollars was a lot of fucking money.”

Theo stares blankly at him. 

“It would really have broken bank. To buy your dog painting.”

Theo’s brain casts desperately around for what the fuck Boris could be talking about until he remembers, “You mean the one I did in high school?” 

Boris nods, the movement sending a few droplets of water down his face that he swipes away with the back of his fist. “Three dollars was all I ever had to my name, probably. And would have given it all to you for that painting if you wanted.” He frowns hard, tipping his head back against the lip of the pool to look up at the sky. “Wish you hadn’t thrown it away.” 

“Yeah, well,” Theo says without finishing the sentence and Boris looks impossibly sad for a moment, Theo taking a long hit from the joint just for somewhere else to look. 

Boris pushes off the edge and straightens to float on his back, drifting back towards the deeper end of the pool inches at a time. Theo reaches out and hooks his foot around Boris’ ankle, tethering him. It’s the least he can do.

Three heavy blinks later, he’s back in the museum, getting stuck in the mob of a crowd waiting in a sloppy and poorly-organized line to see the Mona Lisa when his vision starts to cloud over. It’s only a few moments before Theo and everyone else realizes it’s not their eyes but smoke that’s been slowly seeping into the exhibit hallway. Then there’s a muffled  _ bang _ from somewhere far off. And it’s the same thing but it’s not, the Met was sudden and loud and then nothingness, but Theo is here for all of this, watching it unfurl in slow-motion, mothers grabbing their children and tourists ducking towards the exits with arms over their heads and there’s a fire at the end of the hall and Theo can’t find his sketchbook, Boris is nowhere to be found, there’s a canvas on the ground that he would know at the end of the world, at the end of his life, and it’s hot and he can’t reach it. The painting starts to burn at the corners, curling up and disintegrating, eating away towards the center until the flash of gold across its wing surrenders to the flame, taking Theo with it.

Theo doesn’t realize he’s trembling until a pair of pale, lean arms encompass him and steady him with a surprising amount of strength, suppressing the tremors in his muscles. And he’s not at the Louvre, he’s in a giant bed in downtown Paris, Boris pressed up against him, smelling of cigarette smoke and weed. He’s sleepy-soft, only half conscious stirred by Theo’s nightmare jolting him awake. “Potter,” he hums, only tightening his arms as Theo tries to squirm out of Boris’s grasp, Theo fully awake and his face hot with embarrassment as he tries to extricate himself from their tangle of limbs. Boris huffs an irritated sigh and wiggles closer, wedging a thigh between Theo’s legs and pressing a smear of a kiss to the corner of Theo’s lips. The heat from the fire in the dream, the smokiness of Boris fades to something warm-soft once Theo accepts that he can’t untangle himself from this, that there’s nowhere else for him to sleep anyway. The weight of Boris’s leg and arms are an anchor until Theo’s head stops swimming.

Boris doesn’t mention it the next morning and Theo is grateful for that. He’s embarrassed by it, certain Boris is doing the simple mental math behind the reasons why Theo doesn’t sleep. In spite of the night, things feel easier in the daytime; without the threat of the Louvre hanging over Theo’s head, he feels lighter.

It turns out neither of them are morning people, sober or not, and they only speak in grunts and one-words as they bumble around packing up. Boris shoulders his way into the bathroom when Theo’s brushing his teeth, waving a delicate gold glass bowl like a white flag peace offering.

Boris, unsurprisingly, has a knack for disabling smoke alarms, standing up on the bathroom counter with his Swiss Army Knife to fiddle with the device on the ceiling and he jumps back down by the time Theo is finished brushing his teeth. Theo sinks to sit along the wall and Boris sits on the edge of the bathtub, watching Theo pack the bowl with expert precision and take the first hit. 

They hotbox the bathroom but leave housecleaning a hefty tip, high and giggly over whether they should leave American or European cash and end up with a crumpled mix of bills on the nightstand. 

The hotel breakfast is the best Theo’s ever had, both thanks to the marijuana and the fact that it’s the most expensive hotel in Paris. They find a table against the lobby windows, Theo with a bucket of ice, champagne and orange juice and Boris balancing a packed plate of pastries and fruit, each settling into their chairs. 

They share a bottle’s worth of mimosas and Boris’s fingers precisely pick apart the contents of his plate into equal halves, the table soon covered with the flakey crumbs of croissants and muffins and the skin of a peeled grapefruit that they split. Boris is a mix of adult manners and a feral street child, still high and giggly as he tries to smear butter onto a slice of bread and can’t spread it, abandoning the knife in favor of using his fingers instead. It’s a soft and childish gesture like his arms around Theo last night, something warm swelling in Theo’s chest when Boris passes him half of his buttered roll. Boris kicks his legs out far under the table and hooks an ankle around Theo’s calf, then props an elbow up on the table, his chin perched in a palm and turned to look out the windows towards the Eiffel Tower. 

In the silence Theo remembers a small snatch of the night before, after the pool, Boris raiding the mini-bar still damp and shirtless, cracking every tiny bottle open and feeding them to Theo in shots. One of them complaining about shitty hotel room art between lines of coke turned into Boris pinning Theo against the loveseat in the corner, drunk and insistent, “If these people can claim they are artists, how can you not, Potter!” And Theo lighting a cigarette, trying to look anywhere except up at the man half-straddling him, “It’s not the same, Boris.”

“You’re right, Potter, is not the same!” Boris had said, like he’d won the argument already when there was never anything to win or lose. “Is fucking different ballpark, leagues above! Different sport entirely that you are playing! Best I have ever seen. Ever ever, swear to you. Nobody on earth like you.”

Even fucked out of his mind, Boris is somehow more genuine than any of Theo’s clients have ever been, their polite hums at Theo’s canvases and gratefulness for the speed of his restorations the most validation he usually gets, the occasional “tip” of maybe fifty bucks tacked on for his “fine work.” Theo never would have guessed that the most forceful and sincere praise he’d get would come from a crime boss. And yet it doesn’t really matter as much as all that, does it? Boris’s career and the real reason Boris brought him to Paris. Because this is the same boy who would share his cocaine and vodka with Theo at parties when nobody else would, when Boris didn’t even know Theo’s actual name. The same boy who allegedly stood and stared at Theo’s acid-induced paintings at the high school’s shitty art show. The boy who noticed Theo’s sudden and mysterious absence. The boy who turned up at Theo’s studio a decade and a half later. Deliberately. He sought Theo out deliberately. And even if half of that reason was for work, there had to be another reason. The same reason that drove fifteen year old Boris to share joints with Theo in smokey basements and give him rides home on the back of his bike pegs, both of them drunk. The same reason Boris booked two flights to fucking Paris at a casual wish of Theo’s. 

So maybe, Theo thinks to himself as Boris finishes off his own mimosa and tops off both their glasses with the rest of the champagne, Theo can find a reason to stay this time. 

Boris is poking a pinky finger against the glass, trying to point out some distant building to Theo when his phone buzzes loudly against the wooden table. Boris scoops it up, presses it to one ear with an unreadable glance at Theo. “ _ Tak.”  _

The longer Boris is on the phone, the heavier Theo’s chest begins to feel, Boris’s face hardening until his brow is deeply furrowed, eyes dark and stern. He only listens for an agonizingly long minute and then says, “Okay,” and hangs up. Boris fills his pockets with the table’s supply of tiny jam and jelly jars and stands with a disarming swiftness, headed straight for the lobby doors.

“I must go to Florence,” Boris says and Theo can only hear half of it because the man is striding away too quickly for Theo to comprehend, grabbing his coat and half a croissant still in his mouth as he half-jogs to catch up. “You are going back to New York, yes? Do me a favor,” except he says it in the same way Theo’s clients do, friendly but underneath meaning  _ you will do this for me  _ and Theo can’t say no, “I have meeting at Met Thursday. Not a big deal, not criminal. Just picking up something they decided they did not want. I can send someone to go with you, ask for James in archives - ” Boris steps out on the sidewalk where Gyuri’s black Escalade waits, but Theo has stopped in his tracks halfway from the hotel door to the car. “Potter,” Boris interrupts himself when he realizes Theo is no longer next to him. 

“No, Boris,” Theo says except his voice wavers and Boris waves a dismissive hand.

“Is not criminal, I swear on my life, I just need someone to pick up - ”

“I mean the Met,” Theo stutters out. Boris has one arm outstretched from where he’s standing at the car’s door, trying to wave Theo into the vehicle but he’s gone still. “I can’t go to the Met, Boris.”

Boris’s face, still stony from the call, only softens minutely, a crack in the form of his mouth twitching downwards in a concerned frown. He huffs a sigh and looks down the street like he’s deciding whether the priority should be getting Theo in the car or finding a way to force Theo to go to the Met for him. Theo’s throat tightens, plaster and smoke and dust still sticking to his lungs over a decade later. “Boris. Please.”

A horn blares from behind Gyuri’s car and Boris rolls his eyes, exasperated, and flips off the car with his still-outstretched arm. “Okay. Okay,” he relents and Theo edges towards the car before finally ducking into the backseat. Boris slides in afterwards and Theo only realizes he’s trembling when Boris cups the back of his neck with a cool hand, turning Theo’s head towards his own and pressing his forehead hard against Theo’s for a long moment. 

Theo breathes through it, biting down on the impulse to apologize because he knows Boris won’t either. His eyes drift closed, focusing on the steady puff of Boris’ breath that he thinks he can feel run across his lips, trying to remember if the press of Boris’ lips against his were part of the dream or the impossible reality he’s found himself in. Gyuri slams a door and Boris leans back to look at Theo with a hopeful smile, though the darkness in his eyes betray the wheels still spinning in his mind, still trying to calculate whatever Theo needs. Theo doesn’t know how to find the answer for him and eventually Boris stops trying. Boris’ hand slides from the back of Theo’s neck down to his chest before it finally leaves him, leaving tingling skin in its wake.

At the airport, Theo climbs out, grabbing his bag before Gyuri can slide out of the front seat, and turns, expecting Boris to follow him, but he doesn’t. He hands over Theo’s printed boarding pass and says, “Safe flight, Potter.”

Theo stares at him, expression thunderous, as Boris nods at him, unrepentant, and closes the car door between them. The world keeps spinning even when Theo stands perfectly still, turning and turning until Boris is out of sight and Theo is out of mind.

\--


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're done, babyyyyyyyyy

He doesn’t mean to do it. It’s more of a subconscious decision, the dark brown hair of Modigliani’s women seems too dark, the blunted bob against the figure’s already white-pale skin looks wrong. Framing her light blue eyes makes her look like a vampire or something, something long-dead with life breathed back into it and so the first thing Theo does is blush up her cheeks. He makes them far pinker than Modigliani ever did but he did produce a number of portraits of flushed-faced children, at least. He adds more green to her eyes before the paint sets as well, mouth etched into a deep frown as he glances back and forth between his canvas and the high-resolution image pulled up on his computer on the desk next to him. Something acidic and sharp in his throat that makes him itch for a cigarette. The woman’s eyes staring back at him now makes him feel claustrophobic and restless, deadened and sharp looks like the social workers from his youth. Like the cold and slightly disappointed look he got from Mrs. Barbour when she caught him sneaking one of Platt’s cigarettes. 

Before he knows it the Modigliani in front of him has shifted away from his later blank-eyed style to the more detailed eyes that the artist sometimes used in his earlier works. He lightens her hair a bit, too, streaks of golden brown to frame her face. Better.

He and Boris have established enough of a routine now where he doesn’t feel the need to obsessively check over the drying canvas in the hours before Boris’s arrival, instead leaving the canvas packaged neatly on his workbench as soon as it’s dry and he’s taken care of creating the amount of functional damage expected for a painting of this age. He likes the painting a lot, one of the rare times he kind of wants to keep one. 

Theo is elbows deep in his workbench sink cleaning brushes when Boris arrives, sweeping up the stairs with his usual air of interest now that he has keys to Theo’s place. “Packaged and everything?” he asks Theo with a note of surprise and then there’s the sound of the carrying case unsnapping, the peeling of tape being ripped off.

“I figured I’d make your job easier,” Theo replies, trying to sound genuine but there’s a note of bitterness in his voice that gets him a raised eyebrow from the man at the table. Not like it took the better part of an hour to properly wrap it in the paper and cloth that Boris slices easily through with a pocketknife to uncover the canvas.

He’s not sure what kind of response he anticipates from Boris, previous reactions to Theo’s work ranging wildly from boundless thrill and enthusiasm to casual shrugs and thanks to silent, open-mouthed admiration. So when Boris deadpans, “What the fuck is this?” Theo thinks, for a moment, that he’s joking. 

Until he turns around, dropping the handful of damp brushes into their respective cups on the counter that he sees that Boris is not joking. He’s frowning hard down at the painting and then looks up to meet Theo’s eye, expression caught somewhere between shock and upset. Theo feels his own face fall into a similar expression. “What?”

He kneads his hands into the dirty sink rag as he moves closer, each step making something in his chest tighten. Because the closer he gets, the less the canvas looks like a genuine Modigliani. The colors too warm, the brushstrokes in the woman’s face too precise. To the untrained eye it could pass, but to the trained eye - the eye that matters here - it might as well have been drawn by a child with a crayon. 

“You cannot waste your time on this shit.”

Theo knows he’s right, he knows he’s fucked up, but there’s something inside him that yanks him up by the hair to keep his head high. It’s not what he meant to do, but it’s Theo’s, it’s born from a place within him that’s instinctual, it’s honest, and it’s  _ good _ . “It’s not - it’s not a waste, it’s. I don’t know, it’s something.”

“Is not Modigliani, is fucking mess. Who is this? Who have you painted?”

Theo looks back at the painting. He hadn’t seen her in the details, puzzle pieces shifting and sliding together like kismet, slowly forming the final picture that couldn’t be seen until he shifted back away from it altogether and reconfigured his eyes to see different lines. He knows it’s his mother. He’s touched her cheek through the canvas, conjured up her smile in each stroke. Her face swims in the portrait so much Theo has to look away.

“I’ll do another one. It’s fine.”

Boris pulls out his phone and starts tapping at it, though god knows who he might have to message about this, since Theo thought he was the only other person involved in this. The painting goes limp in his other hand. “I don’t have time to wait. We must sell.  _ Fuck _ . This is weak shit, you know this and you show it to me anyway.”

Theo stares at him, taken aback. “Fuck you.” 

His fist squeezes at the rag so he doesn’t do something stupid with it, like hit him for saying that about her - about the painting, he means. He can’t even pretend he was just fucking around because it’s plain, to both the trained or untrained eye, the amount of earnestness he poured into it. The painting feels like truth to Theo and Boris is accusing him of lying. And he should have been lying, all he ever does is lie because the truth is a tenuous, raw nerve that shouldn’t be left vulnerable to strike.

Boris looks at him closely. “Are you fucking high?”

He is, on Jerome’s deal of the week, but. “What does that matter?”

Boris swears, tossing the painting onto the workbench with a carelessness that makes Theo want to scream. It doesn’t make sense, none of this makes sense.

“What’s the rush?”

Boris’ face shutters closed, impenetrable. “Is business.”

He’s seen Boris secretive, impenetrable, but it’s always with this air of nonchalance, the sort of thing that might lead him to pat Theo condescendingly on the head and say  _ don’t worry your pretty little head about it  _ if there wasn’t at least some minor chance Theo would smack him for it. It’s the brusqueness that’s the red flag. “Is it - do you owe someone money?”

“You don’t worry about the fucking numbers, you paint the fucking paintings. You know what we are doing here.” 

“It’s fine - I’ll - ” Theo starts, but Boris cuts him off.

“I cannot fucking sell this! You’ve wasted two weeks on a piece I cannot give to the client.” 

“I got it,” Theo finally snaps, Boris’ point more than made. It’s not clear what else Boris wants him to do about this, the way he keeps harping as he paces the floor, like he won’t stop moving until Theo prostrates himself at Boris’ feet, kissing at his shining boots until he’s suitably begged for forgiveness. “I’m sorry - I was. Projecting or whatever. I’ll fix it.”

“You want to fucking project go buy some canvas and paint your own tragedy, Potter!”

Theo sees his father echoing in the disgust in Boris’ face, in Boris’ hand that flies because he’s expressive but could shift to violence in a moment’s notice. Theo doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t blink. “Fuck you, Boris,” he says again, with more heat than he’s ever felt behind the words, burning them and twisting them out of their usual affection and into poison. He has to swallow down  _ I quit _ because he’s not Boris’ fucking employee. He hasn’t been for hire for months, having clearly shifted into something unique but unknown. 

Theo’s angry, like he had been with Kitsey, but it’s laced with something that hurts him deeper, shakes his confidence, fills him with dread. Boris kissed him and held him. Boris has seen the worst of him. But Theo doesn’t know if he meant it, or if that’s just what it took to get him to do what Boris needed him to do. He may be watching their relationship play out ahead of him like it comes with an asterisk - _I need you until I don’t,_ _you’re useful until you fuck up. _And Theo didn’t - Theo -

Theo shakes his head. He can’t go there now, he can’t feel any of this. He can’t look at Boris and the way his face has fallen, probably molding already into whatever penitence he thinks Theo will require of him.

“I have an appointment,” Theo says in self-defense.

Boris says, “Potter,” because he has to have the last word, always, but Theo’s said enough. He leaves Boris alone in the studio to hide in the bathroom like a child with a towel stuffed in the crack in the door, smoking up in the tub until he hears a couple doors close to signal Boris has left. He sits curled up in the cold porcelain long after he’s done with the joint, eyes trained so intently on the medicine cabinet that it starts to swirl. 

He focuses on _ nothing, nothing, nothing _ , chanting it silently over and over like that guided meditation he did once with Platt, of all people, like maybe he could force the full contents of his brain out just by sheer stubbornness, but speaking into existence what he wanted to have. Nothing. This is nothing, it’s nothing. But  _ it’s nothing  _ turns into _ I’m nothing _ . But  _ I’m nothing to Boris  _ hurts as much as it helps, and it can’t become  _ this was something _ . 

There’s one too many small cracks on his heart threatening to expand and join until the whole thing seizes and shatters. There was Pippa who let him down so easy Theo hadn’t thought he could get back up, and Kitsey who slipped away so painlessly Theo hadn’t taken the time to hate her for fucking the guy who killed his mother. The only common denominator between the three of them is Theo. Theo, the fucking nightmare who invites this upon himself.

He’s pulled from drowning by the buzz of his phone in his pocket, the half hour reminder that he hadn’t lied to Boris in the end, only stretched the truth across several hours in order to save himself. He strips out of his clothes while still standing in the shower, tossing them on the floor instead of hanging his suit like he normally would. He turns to crank the shower on and lets the spray him like the wakeup call he needs. He swallows a pill from his stash dry and blow dries and parts his hair carefully. He dresses the part until he feels the part, until he can surface that part within him that feeds purely on business. 

His 5:30 is a referral named Lucian Reeve, someone who learned of Theo through a business partner of a business partner, with an authentication that sounds cut and dry. It’s exactly what Theo needs now, the illusion of real work, someone who might tell someone who might tell someone that Theo’s still operating legitimately. He’s strayed so far from Boris’ 70% recommendation, but the money still flows from the reproductions, and Hobie’s debt is more than paid off, and Theo could have everything he ever wanted if what he wanted could be bought. And maybe he’s fucked all that up now.

Mr. Reeve arrives exactly on time, the bell ringing just as the coffee machine in the corner signals its work is done. Theo dissociates, smiles his customer-facing smile, says all the right things, gives the amused exhale people like Mrs. Barbour do instead of laughing in all the right places, the picture of a standard business transaction. Then Mr. Reeve pulls the painting out of his carrying case and Theo schools his face as quick as he can manage, blank-faced in front of a variation on Rubens’  _ Prometheus Bound  _ that Theo knows intimately. 

“I bought it from a friend of yours,” Reeve says.

Theo’s eyebrows go up, his face carefully placid as he hums, ambiguous at the thought of the wide circle of art dealers or gallery owners he pretends are his friends when in reality that type are all too far up their own asses to even look them in the eye. But Theo knows exactly who he means, precisely which demon has damned him tonight. Theo can still smell his scent on the air, track the trail he has traced through this very room, through Theo’s whole life. Even when he’s gone, he’s everywhere.

“Your friend made the mistake of selling a painting to someone who knows the difference.”

“The difference?” Theo says carefully.

Reeve casts about the room before his eyes settle on the reproduction of Pissaro on the other side of the room. “Between what’s real and what’s fake.”

Theo huffs a confused laugh that curls his lips into a confused smile, hoping it reads as genuine. By the steel set of Reeve’s jaw, Theo is failing, slowly, and in danger of never recovering. “I apologize if I have certified this forgery through whichever dealer you purchased it from. I would be happy to arrange something between the three of us to ensure you are compensated for the misstep.”

“You are very talented, Mr. Decker. These are impressive. Easier to fence, I imagine than your usual fare. However, that is what I am in the market for. The real thing.” He produces a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket, which he unfolds and places in front of Theo. Theo recognizes the names of each painting on the list, all of them stolen, one of them shaking Theo like it’s turned his bones tectonic, shifting and crashing within him.

“You’re mistaken, Mr. Reeve. I do not recover lost works, I am certain law enforcement or the FBI would be better suited.” Theo refolds the paper and slides it across the desk back toward Reeve, who doesn’t take it.

Reeve’s expression has turned impatient now. “Your friend’s been fucking me over since Vegas. I have reached the end of the line. You tell him I want these in one week. If I don’t see them, I’m not coming after him. I’m coming after you. And that old man two doors down whose shop you’ve been laundering money through.” He slaps the carrying case shut over the reproduction, locks clicking into place with what is usually a satisfying sound, but now rings out like a death knell. “I’ll see you next week, Mr. Decker.”

\--


	12. Chapter 12

They had been curled up together on the couch at Theo’s in the early days, blithely discussing requirements like any other job.  Boris insisted that unsigned paintings are not forgery and Theo tried to let him believe that lie enough for the both of them. Like maybe that was their one saving grace, appropriating everything about these artists but leaving their names unsigned like a debt owed to John Proctor. Boris had promised he’d be selling them to people who didn’t know the difference - ha - but Theo knew better anyway. He’d be selling to people who only wanted the paintings for the name, they didn’t care how carefully and beautifully constructed it was. They wanted the history inherent, the weight of the name, the casual nods of recognition on a tour of the house. They wanted a Degas, not a Decker. 

It was easier to justify what he’d done, when he imagined these people who lacked passion, who would abuse their collection not by improper care but misuse. Those few days he had successfully convinced himself he couldn’t be caught, he thought it was because they were too stupid, too complacent to ever find out the truth.

Theo takes the train to Boris’ place, doesn’t even call him first to see if he’s home, but by some stroke of luck, he is. Theo storms through the building and up the stairs, remembering Boris telling him back in Paris that he hadn’t been caught since Vegas. He thinks of the burns up Boris’ back. Even in his worst nightmares, he’d only pictured prison, hadn’t even left room for the ways someone could break his body. His hands can’t stop shaking.

Boris answers the door, stepping aside without question just with one look at him. “Potter. You okay?”

“No.”

“Listen, I am sorry about earlier. You know how it is,” Boris assumes when really Theo has no idea what the  _ it _ is referring to. “I do not like to lose my temper, is very unprofessional.” He presses a gentle hand to Theo’s lower back and pushes him through to the kitchen. “And it makes me a bad friend. Very bad friend. Do you want a drink?”

The answer is yes, the answer is that he needs it more than he wants it, but this is how it happens to him, this is how he lets Boris soften him. “No.”

Boris shrugs it off but pours one for himself, leaving Theo to stand unmoored in the middle of the kitchen. “You are always working, paint, paint, paint, you know how I worry. Maybe you should take a break, no?”

“I - ” Theo pauses at the flash of Reeve’s pursed lips through his mind. “Yeah, maybe.”

Boris tips his glass at Theo, leaning back against his countertops. His black shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, the top buttons undone, his curls mussed like he’s absently ran a hand through it a time or two. And he runs his mouth, like always. There’s never any part of him that isn’t a weapon, loaded and aimed at Theo’s resolve. “I sold the Chagall this afternoon after I left you. Tough sell. Weird fucking art, l do not think there is such big market for these paintings.”

“Boris. I came by for a reason.”

“Oh? Not to just see my shining face?”

“No.”

He smiles like he’s in on a joke that Theo isn’t telling. “What is it?”

“A guy came by my office today. My appointment.” Theo’s hand curls around the folded piece of paper in his pocket, an ace in the hole. “He had a painting. He had - he had  _ one _ and he  _ knew _ what it was.”

Boris is quiet for a while, long enough Theo thinks Boris is settling into the panic that Theo feels. But then he says, “Is okay.”

“His name is Lucian Reeve,” Theo says, studying Boris’ face closely for a flicker of recognition that doesn’t come. His face is too well trained.

“Okay,” Boris says again, and Theo wants to slug him across the face. 

“He says you’re also selling stolen art? Is that true?”

“Many things pass through my gallery. Sometimes provenance is incomplete, who am I to judge?” 

Theo’s breath catches in his chest, tinnitus beginning to buzz with a vengeance in his ears. The proximity is paralyzing, he can’t get too close to this, he can’t be associated with this. “We didn’t - I never agreed to that, that was never part of the deal.”

“That is why it is outside our deal, Potter, I have a life that exists beyond your reach,” Boris says with his lips tilted up in amusement, as though he doesn’t understand why this might be news to Theo. It shouldn’t be news to Theo, because he’s known for weeks, maybe months, maybe this whole time, that he never owned all of Boris, just a sliver, if that, of indeterminate size. It stings all the more because Theo doesn’t have a life outside of their deal, there’s almost nothing that belongs to him alone. Not even Hobie remains untouched by Boris now, his safety threatened, unforeseen collateral damage. 

“He wants to you bring these to him, steal them or buy them or whatever the fuck.” Theo hands him the list. Boris’ eyes scan down the list quickly, none of them jumping out to him more than another, not the way one had to Theo. “He’ll come after us. Both of us and - and Hobie. He knows about Hobie, he threatened him, he thinks Hobie’s in on it, but he hasn’t done anything.” 

Boris moves for Theo, places a warm hand on his shoulder, tender but serious. “I will take care of it.”

“Are you sure?” Theo asks, hating the pleading tone his voice has taken on, the way his vulnerability makes him feel like a child, like he has to be at Boris’ mercy. 

“Potter. Have I steered you wrong before?”

Theo thinks the answer is no. But there’s a first time for everything. “What are you going to do? Are you going to give him what he wants? You can’t even get all of these, it’s impossible.”

Boris raises an eyebrow at him. “You are so certain.” Theo’s mouth snaps shut, almost having given the game away, but Boris must decide it’s not worth pursuing. “I am not going to give him what he wants. You show you are vulnerable to one, you are vulnerable to all. I will deal with this.”

“I can’t. I have to - nothing can happen to Hobie.”

“I’ll have some men watch his shop. I will take care of him, you can trust me.”

Theo nearly asks him  _ how _ or  _ why _ , but Boris, maybe sensing it, cuts him off. 

“Please, enough of this, come see. I have something to show you, please. This, this I think you will like,” he says, an out of place measure of excitement in his voice as he leaves the kitchen and turns the corner down a short hallway Theo’s never gone down. Theo follows him hesitantly, tense enough to bail if he has to. Boris flips on a light once they’re in his bedroom, and comes to a stop in front of a wooden dressing table in the corner.

The trouble areas in the dressing table light up the same red as a forged painting, not that Theo needs his intuition to weed this one out. He knows of the issues in the ball and claw feet already, the disingenuous scalloping. He’d recognize a changeling anywhere. 

“How - where did you get that?” Theo’s voice scratches out.

“Is nice, no? A genuine Chippendale, so they say. Got good deal on it.” Boris sounds so proud, it’s sickening. He places his hand on Theo’s hip, too intimate to be borne. Theo slides out his grasp, out of the room, turned abruptly on his heel and taking full advantage of his height to make long strides away from the second worst thing to happen to him today, in a day of only bad things. 

Theo circles in the kitchen, a hand pulling at his hair. “ _ Fuck, _ ” he whispers, “ _ fuck fuck fuck _ .”

He grabs at the first full bottle and pops the top, without respect to the label. Knowing Boris, it could be a Macallan, each sip worth a thousand, and Theo really couldn’t give a shit about it. Hefty slugs of it tip over into his glass nearly to the brim, and Theo throws the whole thing back in four nasty gulps, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. He has to gain control over the deafening buzzing in his ears, but each frantic gulp does nothing to level him out. He stands bent over the kitchen table, fingers pressed hard at the solid wood, eyes hazy and drifting until they catch on a page dated three days ago. He snatches it up when he hears Boris walk in behind him. 

“Potter,” Boris starts, but it’s the laugh in his voice that makes Theo cut him off instantly, unable to bear whatever might come at the end of that thought. 

“What’s this?”

“Warrant,” Boris says, like it’s obvious, and it is obvious, written across the top in bold letters. Theo hates the too casual way Boris leans back again against the counter, his elbows resting gently at the edge on either side of his waist, Theo wants to push him clean over.

“A what - a warrant? A fucking _search_ _warrant_?”

“So FBI sniffs around. They find nothing. You don’t make it so big in the art world as I have without some questions. When you get to my level, you will see.” Boris waves his hand; the obvious condescension in his tone makes Theo nauseated.

“I don’t want to  _ see _ .” Theo’s hand releases the warrant as though he could be tainted by it just from touch, and the warrant flutters quickly to the floor, the way Theo absently scrunched it in his hand relieving it of any aerodynamics. “They think you’re a criminal?”

“We are criminals.”

“No. I wouldn’t have - I wouldn’t have done it if not for you.”

“You wouldn’t?” Boris barks a derisive laugh. “Potter. Please.”

“What?”

Boris looks at him for a long moment, not darkly as though he were about to cut loose the sword of Damocles, but rather like he’s timing the punchline for maximum effect. And it works. “A genuine Chippendale?”

Theo looks back at him, stone faced as he had been with Reeve as he watches Boris collect another secret part of Theo’s life up for his own use. It’s as though the bottom of his heart has dropped out and its contents have slid free, leaving him with nothing left to feel but the knowledge that there’s only one thing that doesn’t belong to both of them now. 

“How long have you known?”

“I don’t get into business with anyone without knowing what kind of business they will put me into.” Boris gets up from the counter finally, dusting his hands though there couldn’t be anything on them. “You were good, but sloppy. I knew your risks. I picked you anyway. Nothing I couldn’t deal with, should I need to.” He’s grinning now, like he’s done Theo a favor. It terrifies Theo. “I thought you would be happy. I had a Theo Decker original.”

“I didn’t - I didn’t make that.”

“The construction, no. But art isn’t just paint on the canvas, brushstrokes. Art is artist, too, art is story, depth, meaning. You gave it meaning by giving it a title, a history - a genuine Chippendale.”

The history inherent, the weight of the name, Theo has been running the same con for a decade, and he hadn’t even put it together.  “Fuck.  _ Fuck _ .”

His life is over now, he knows it more than he ever has - the weight of all he’s done is too great. It’s not enough for one wall to give way, they all must, the ceiling as well, every brick that’s ever been laid to construct Theo’s safety topples, crumbles, poisoning the air with smoke. All of this, all of this has to happen now, because nothing ever happens to him in halves. Theo wheezes in a breath, an ugly, too familiar sound in his chest, his throat. Each breath becomes harder to take, Theo grasping at his chest desperately as though that could help him and it rightfully doesn’t. He wishes this were a heart attack, something that could end him where he stands so he wouldn’t have to live out the consequences of his actions, so he could finally rest easy. 

Boris presses in close, his forehead gently connecting to Theo’s. He answers Theo’s unspoken  _ how, why _ , makes his case for Theo’s trust. “I promise nothing will happen to you.”

The worst part isn’t that Theo believes it’s true - he doesn’t know if he can - it’s that it’s blindingly obvious to Theo that Boris believes it’s true, that Boris believes he is swearing fealty because he believes he owes it to Theo. 

“Promise,” Boris is saying quietly. “Theo.”

His nose slides along Theo’s as he shifts them closer together, close enough that their lips brush light enough to be an accident, passing air back and forth between each other like they’re shotgunning. Theo risks getting high just off proximity so he tears his face away, dragging his feet a few steps back. 

He can feel the weight of the whiskey within him, sobering and solidifying him, antithetically. The way out is lit, obvious, waiting for him.

“I can’t do this anymore.” 

At the devastated look on Boris’ face, Theo almost apologizes, just on reflex at first, but he hates that part of himself that does feel sorry. He leaves before he can say anything incriminating. He has to have the last word.

He rides his buzz all the way out to the storage unit, splurging for a taxi with a rain-cold window he can lean his forehead against to tether himself to something solid as he jets through the city. Nobody asks him any questions at the reception desk, but that’s part of why Theo picked this place. His shoes tap out purposeful footsteps along the concrete floor, echoing back to him to let him know he’s alone, and he always will be. He feels like a marionette, each movement and thought directed by an unseen puppeteer, giving him a singular focus until he slides up the door to his unit with a grunt.

The drugstore Zippo is heavy in his breast pocket and he casts his eyes around the dim room for what the best thing to set first would be; canvas doesn’t burn as easily as people think. Maybe if he sanded off the polish on the leg of a writing desk and held the flame against the bare wood long enough it would catch, if he didn’t pass out from the fumes first. And then the matter of the storage units around his; are they being rented? Would it get hot enough to warp the thin metal walls between their units? He doesn’t know enough about electrics to rig the wiring in the ceilings to make it look accidental. And if it didn’t burn everything proper then he’d be facing arson  _ and  _ art forgery. It seems like  _ such _ a stupid fucking observation but something about it makes Theo twitch out of his trance, staring at the yellow duffelbag shoved into the corner. Throat clenched around the gray bomb of smoke from the Met and the suffocating heat of his dream in Paris and the weight of the lighter in his pocket, he flicks off the unit’s light and locks the door behind him.

\--


	13. Chapter 13

The day after Theo’s world shatters into pieces for the third time, he closes his shop indefinitely. There’s no sign for the door, but the lights stay off, the door and phone go unanswered, and Theo spends all night and all day upstairs in his temperature controlled studio, surrounded by tens of thousands of dollars of equipment that make up the ruins of the life he’d built, staring his mother in the eyes. 

If he looks long enough or hard enough, he can picture her hanging in the Met, bold colors against the unassuming walls, a small placard fixed near proudly proclaiming  _ Audrey, Unchained _ . Her portrait doesn’t grin, but she might be happy there, surrounded by art and life, life and art - art is alive and those who come to see it are art in and of themselves. It would be a happier ending for them both. 

He sees her when he looks away, in the fleeting blink of his eyes. He wants to smear turpentine down her face until the light leaves her eyes, until she can’t look at him anymore. 

Eventually the door opens behind him and Theo just breathes. The FBI don’t have keys and they don’t know the alarm code. Theo remains seated where he is, no instinct to turn and greet him as he tries to figure out if it would be worth destroying the humidifier just so he could heave it at Boris. 

Apropos of nothing, Boris begins to speak from where he stands at the door, “I’m certain Reeve knew about the warrant, thought it would be good time to strike, that we are vulnerable. Scrambling to stay clean.”

If Theo hadn’t gone to Boris’ that night, he suspects he would never have learned of the warrant. He wouldn’t have lived in constant fear of his own shadow, tasted anxiety like acid in his mouth, planned twenty different ways he could convince Hobie to run with him to hide out at Pippa’s in London, counted out how many pills he could swallow one by one until he didn’t feel anything anymore. He feels everything in every cell in his body, everything so heightened he starts to feel numb, like he’s taken in so much power that he’s had no choice but to short out and become nothing.

“I told you, I’m fucking done. Get out,” Theo says, his voice quiet, not resigned but drained.

“I think you will be interested in this.” 

Theo can hear him cross, the heels of his shoes clicking like a warning until he comes to a stop on the other side of Theo at the desk. Out of the corner of his eye, Theo can see him set a wood case on the table, a small one Theo gave him to carry thirteen-by-nines when they need to focus on sketches and studies instead of full works. Theo doesn’t look at him, as though maybe by sheer force of will, he’ll be able to disappear Boris if he doesn’t look at him, but then Boris lifts the top of the case, fingers digging into darkness within to coax the painting out. Then Boris says, “What is this, Potter? Is pretty good, I must say.”

For a moment, he thinks, Boris must be fucking with him, even if he doesn’t know it. Or even if he does know it. Boris has gotten a fairly good reproduction, and that’s all. But then he flips it over, admiring the verso, the painstakingly accurate verso, as he says, “I went to the storage unit.”

“What - the storage unit? What?” Theo asks, his head spinning trying to simultaneously stitch the last great secret of his life to Boris and rip out the seams. 

“The storage unit. Where you keep your paintings? I don’t know why you keep this secret from me, why you insist on playing middle man. I made copy of the key a few months back, is faster this way.”

“Why?”

“I had to sell, I told you.” Boris looks down at the painting with something like fondness, and it raises the hair on the back of Theo’s neck. “I admit I was worried when you went there last night, but happy to see all was well.”

“Don’t - don’t fucking touch it,” Theo gasps.

“Why not?”

“I said put it the fuck down.”

Boris, in a rare moment of concession, sets onto the table, not back into the case, like he knows what Theo has to do. Theo rushes over and slips his gloves on to inspect the painting carefully for any damage. He snaps his mouth shut so he doesn’t breath his wet, gasping breaths over the painting, which hasn’t seen the light of day in over a decade. He passes a gentle finger over the light chain around the bird’s foot like he’s seeing it for the first time, like its fragility hasn’t haunted Theo for years, like Theo hadn’t just wanted the bird to realize that if it tried hard enough, one of the links might have given way, thin as they are.

“It’s real, isn’t it,” Boris says. Theo doesn’t answer, he won’t. From the tone of Boris’ voice, it’s clear he already knows the answer. “It’s  _ The Goldfinch _ , no?”

Theo flinches hearing the name said aloud for the first time in years, something so precious and so deeply hidden within himself that he can’t even bring himself to name it in his thoughts, and there is Boris, speaking its name like it’s not an incantation. 

“I thought it was coincidence, maybe, is on Reeve’s list, maybe had started to reproduce yourself. But. It is real,” Boris says, and he sounds now like he’s in awe. “The secrets that you keep, Potter.”

Theo’s hands shake as he painstakingly talks himself into putting his painting back into its case, hiding it away where it belongs, safe from everyone’s eyes, even his own, so that nothing could ever happen to it again. 

“You know for someone who is hanging up on stolen art, this is odd to have, no?”

“It’s not - it’s different,” Theo snaps, his voice thick and heavy with tears that he hadn’t realized were puddling in his eyes. In a blink, the tears slide down Theo’s cheeks in a fleeting burst of freedom until Theo swipes them away with quick nudges of each shoulder. “That’s different. I didn’t steal it.”

“It was gifted to you? Met hands out priceless works, consolation to victims of bombings.” Boris tsks and tilts his head. “No. You purchased perhaps?”

“Don’t fucking make fun of me.”

Nobody has ever asked him why he’d taken it before because nobody had a reason to, it’s not something he’d ever thought he could articulate it. Theo can still hear Welty’s voice when he closes his eyes, telling Theo to take it as though he had any right. He can’t lay it at Welty’s feet - the final wishes of a dying man seen through - the same as he can’t lay it at his mother’s for loving it in earnest. All it really was is he was young and scared and needed a tether to something real, even if he didn’t know at the time that it would represent the last moment in his life that ever felt real, normal. After that morning, Theo had shifted suddenly into an alternate universe and knowing that beneath the yellowing newspaper resided proof of the life he could have had, wanted to have, was enough some days. And now that safety is gone.

“Why are you doing this to me?” Theo asks, trying to read Boris’ face to find traces of cruelty, but there are none, there never seems to be, contrary to his actions. “Is this about the money?”

“To work in art is to live in a deficit, don’t worry about the money.” Truth coupled with a lie. There had been relief on Boris’ face yesterday that he’d sold the Chagall, Theo knows it. 

Theo knows what it means to owe someone. He knows what debt does to a man - has done to a man. He can’t picture Boris laid out on a highway, body so broken and bloody it’s nearly beyond recognition. If Reeve has ties back to Vegas, if being caught this time means the same for them as it did for Boris the last time he got caught or worse, Theo will just be his father’s son. And if it’s not them, then it’s the Feds. If his life isn’t taken, then his livelihood will be and somehow that feels just as threatening.

“Then why?”

“You and me, Potter, cut from same cloth. We’re the same.”

“No.”

“I understand. It’s okay. I am doing this to help you. You and your bird.” Boris has the audacity to grin at him, like this is great news.

“You’re not helping me. You shouldn’t have touched this.” 

“I am. This is good. I know now. I can plan for this, you will see.”

Theo shakes his head, sliding the case across the table until he can hug it to his torso. “They’ll find it. They’ll know. They’ll take it from me, I can’t - do you  _ know _ what they do to people like me? When they find out we’ve. That we have.” 

“Stolen art? Yes.” Boris moves his hand forward, stopping abruptly as if he thought better of it. Theo is relieved that he didn’t have to openly recoil from him, but Boris’ hand still sits between them like a dangerous invitation, a threat or a promise Theo watches carefully. It’s moments before he speaks again. “I could take care of it.”

Theo jerks, clutching the case tighter. “What? No.”

“Nobody would know. Would not come back to you.”

Theo shakes his head. Boris isn’t getting it, to the point where he’s being willfully obtuse about it. It isn’t Theo’s to give up, he’s made peace with that by now. He hasn’t looked over his shoulder in years, he’s breathed normally any time he’s opened  _ The Times  _ to its tribute each year. He has exercised his own private version of eminent domain, protects his painting better than he does himself. If he parts with it, he’ll have to cleave off part of himself, like fully losing a limb.

Still, there’s a traitorous thought that echoes in his head, a gentle  _ what if? _ that has him questioning his own resolve for a heart pounding second. What if he was free from that particular burden? What if the weight he’s learned to live with could be taken off? The biggest in his compounding series of crimes sits in his arms, and he could give it up,  _ that’s not mine, that’s not my problem. _ He could -

Theo tamps that down quickly. “Everything comes back to you. If Reeve could find out we’re together, the fucking FBI can.” 

Across the table, Boris’ fingers curl under, making a loose fist, his only reaction, but it says enough. 

“What the fuck is this?”

“A bird,” Boris says blandly.

“No. This. Between us. What is this?”

Boris tilts his head, his eyebrows furrowing. “I do not understand what you mean.”

“You know exactly what I fucking mean, don’t play that foreign language bullshit on me.” When Theo glances down again, Boris’ fist has tightened. “I can’t tell if you want to fuck me or fuck me over.”

Theo had honestly just said it to get a rise out of him, but the way Boris stiffens has Theo panicking again. The tightness in Boris’ jaw, the thin press of his lips together,  _ fuck _ , one of them could be correct and Theo doesn’t even know which one he’d prefer, which would would hurt him less. His silence is out of character, torturous. “Fucking say something.”

“I wasn’t lying, I never did. Always the truth,” Boris says finally, voice strained like it’s painful. “I liked you then, in Vegas, in Mrs. Spenser’s fucking English class. I like you now. It could have been simple, one maybe two jobs, but Theo, you come alive in these paintings. Before our work, you were nothing, to leave without what we have done, you would have become nothing again, one bad day away from the end. I could not be your cause of death.”

Theo’s breath comes out like a stutter, because it’s worse than he had pictured, it’s something deeper and unnameable, not because it’s unknown to Theo but because he’d rather it remain anonymous. Boris talks like his intentions give him absolution, but Theo can’t grant that to him.

“You have violated everything in my life, every small shred of control you’ve somehow managed to convince me to surrender to you. I trusted you. I wanted you - ” Theo swallows, “in my life. This is a fucking nightmare, this whole thing.”

“Yes,” Boris admits. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”

“But it is.”

“No. We could - ” Boris cuts off with a huff. 

He looks at Theo for a long time, like he can glean everything he needs to just from Theo’s face, his skin printed with words unsaid, secrets welling out of his pores. Theo keeps his hands clutched around the case instead of pressed over his face like his instincts tell him to do because Boris deserves to know the truth now. He’s ruined Theo’s life, and for what? Not for a noble cause, not like the changelings, but just greed, pure greed and the sick satisfaction of pulling one over on someone. 

“I’m going to leave,” Boris says, before Theo has the chance to tell him to. “We can talk about this tomorrow. Cooler heads, yes?” When he passes Theo, his hand squeezes at Theo’s shoulder, the same one that had reached for him, and it leaves a burning in its wake, like a branding on Theo’s skin, ugly and permanent, one to match Boris’ own. 

\--


	14. Chapter 14

He doesn’t sleep, ears trained to the smallest sounds, to each groan or click of the old building sounding like a harbinger of the police instead of proof of life in New York City. He’d never known silence growing up, each apartment coming with its own soundtrack - even something as luxurious as the Barbours’. He hadn’t fallen asleep to a perfect deafness until he’d moved to Vegas, the wide wide expanse of nothing closing him in and blocking everything out. He hadn’t slept then, either, not for a while, but that could have been due to the trauma just as easily as it could be due to the silence.

So he’s already awake when the FBI finally arrives a few days later. They don’t tell him much about why they’re here, and Theo doesn’t ask, in a way that tries to portray that he’s just too scared to, not that he already knows why. They don’t care anyway, they don’t care about him, only enough to leave one of them standing at Theo’s side while they move from room to room, picking apart his life. The last time Theo had his life carefully dissected, it was also at the hands of law enforcement. He remembers telling the police officers  _ The Anatomy Lesson  _ was a Rembrandt, as if that made any difference, as if they gave a shit. 

Eventually he has to unlock his studio upstairs for them, and they file in with no regard for the fact that it’s meant to be a clean room. Theo doesn’t know if they understand they’re standing in front of tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, if they should know to be suspicious. But their hands go everywhere, gloved but to Theo’s eyes still leaving a greasy smear behind to mark everything that he’ll have to cleanse of their meddling.

He doesn’t ask to sit on a stool, he just does, so his legs don’t betray him and give out as they get closer,  _ warm warmer red hot _ . Bile burns at Theo’s throat when they find the trunk Theo had quickly hidden his painting in, not having found a replacement storage unit yet, or not quite trusting himself to part with it now that he’s seen it again.

The agent unearths the case from under a pile of spare canvases and unlatches it, two clicks yet again a harbinger for Theo’s arrest. She pulls out the canvas inside slowly, Theo’s heart making a similar migration through his neck from his chest. 

She doesn’t raise the alarm, but rather sets the case and canvas aside on the table, as if she didn’t care what was in it, as if she had no idea what it was worth. Theo leans forward slightly, not drawing the attention of either agent, until he can just peer over the edge of the case, at a canvas that’s too white, too modern, has an unnatural plastic sheen from it. Theo slides off the stool and takes a full step forward like his body isn’t in control, telling himself it isn’t possible, even though he can see the canvas clearly and there’s no mistaking that it’s blank, a brand new canvas bought from Blick, still wrapped in fucking cellophane.

They find nothing. They say nothing. They leave Theo’s office, studio, and apartment like a wasteland, a tornado having run through it and left without a mark on its conscience. He knows they’ll find a reason to be back. Reeve will divert them back when he finds out tomorrow Theo hasn’t done what he’s asked - it may not be this week or the next, but they’ll darken his door and he’ll live in fear of their shadow.

He turns to find his mother staring at him, too much kindness in her eyes, softness in her features. It’s not what Theo deserves. 

Theo quickly lets himself in two doors down, hunched over under the small awning to protect the case in his arms. It’s raining but he knows Hobie will still be able to tell he’s been crying. Hobie can tell, but he’s a gentleman until the end, so he says nothing when he looks up from his desk where he’s carefully comparing two pieces of wood. Theo peels off his coat and hangs it on the rack just to turn away from him and swipe at his face a few more times.

“Hey, are you okay? Are you doing well?”

“Yeah,” Hobie laughs. “Yeah, I’m okay, Theo. Are you?”

“No, it’s fine, I’m fine, it’s just. I haven’t heard from you in a while, I wanted to check in.”

Hobie switches out his work glasses for his regular glasses, a small smile on his face that always means he’s being indulgent of whatever nonsensical thing Theo’s doing. It’s comforting, shocks warmth into the cold tips of Theo’s fingers. “I appreciate that, I do. You’ve had your nose to the grindstone these past couple of months. Business must be booming.”

“Yeah. I just wanted to check.” Theo shifts on his feet, eyes on the case in his hands, on the dust on the floor, on the half-built changeling that stands before him, anything to keep from meeting Hobie’s eyes. “You know where our accounts are, right?” 

Hobie waits for a moment, his hands pressed firmly against his thighs, before he says, “Would you like some tea?”

“Yeah - yes, sure, thank you,” Theo mutters, following Hobie up the stairs.

“Have you eaten?”

“Yes,” Theo lies, because it’s been days. “The account numbers and the banks.”

“What?”

“The account numbers and the bills, you still have them? You have the address where I send the rent?”

“It’s still in the folder in the office, Theo, what’s going on? Are you okay?” Hobie lights the gas burner under the tea kettle and then fixes Theo with a stare so open and serious, Theo has to sit down at the kitchen table. 

“I brought you something.” With the deflection, he turns and sets the case on the table and liberates the painting, laying it down carefully in front of Hobie’s usual chair, an invitation to join Theo that Hobie takes.

Hands folded in his lap, Hobie takes in the painting, his eyes tracing slow paths up and down every inch. The moment feels charged in the way that Theo’s old critiques used to, back when he was still learning the craft and he’d present his work to Hobie, breath held and eyes nearly squinted shut at the fear of criticism. Though Hobie was always frank, he was never harsh, his words never crippled. But it may just because Theo’s never shown him something this honest before, Theo’s never made himself this vulnerable.

“You painted this.”

“Yeah,” Theo answers, even though it wasn’t a question. 

Theo can’t even remember if he ever showed Hobie a picture of her, or if the first time he’s seeing her is through Theo’s eyes, a biased complement to hearing of her only through Theo’s mouth. He’s not even sure if the painting is how she would want to be known, how she truly was. There’s no depth in the two dimensions, the portrait says nothing about the particular kind of disappointment she reserved only for him, or the way her back muscles shifted when she hailed a taxi. It’s not Picasso’s objective truth, it’s subjective, Theo’s sorry attempt to capture her in colors that have been tamed and worked into paints when the reality is such a wild combination of technicolors that he couldn’t dare to translate them. He hasn’t brought her to life, he’s shamed her. This is why he doesn’t paint. “I know you didn’t - you didn’t know her,” Theo says. “This was stupid.”

Theo shifts to take it back. “No,” Hobie says, then again, softer, “no.” Hobie gently sets the painting against the wall next to him, like his mother sits at the table with them, both no generously saying  _ don’t take it back _ and  _ it isn’t stupid _ . “She was beautiful.”

Theo nods.

The kettle screams and Hobie makes their tea the same way - splash of milk, one sugar. Theo took his tea like Hobie did because he thought it would take less work, that he’d be less of a burden for Hobie in all the ways he could think of, so that one day he wouldn’t look up and decide Theo was more trouble than he was worth. Theo should have known better than to think that of Hobie, but that kind of trust takes years. Theo reminds himself firmly, trust takes years.

Theo takes a bolstering sip, too hot to swallow but he needs the courage, and says, not as calmly as he hopes, “I think you should leave town. Just for a few days. Take a break.”

Hobie doesn’t drink his tea, but keeps his fingers, dark, dry, and careworn, wrapped around the mug. Maybe that much is enough to give him strength too. “Theo. What have you done?”

The question seems too enormous to answer, but he has to. He starts at the beginning. “Do you know  _ The Goldfinch _ ?” Theo asks, the words weighty and unnatural in his mouth. He can’t remember the last time he’s ever said them out loud, if he’s ever said them out loud. 

Hobie doesn’t learn everything, doesn’t learn that he’s an unwitting accomplice, because Theo can’t bring himself to admit that he’s tainted Hobie’s changelings, his own art, with deception. But Theo tells him of the Met, of the storage unit, of every reproduction. He strips himself truly bare for Hobie’s judgement. 

Theo has heard that pain shared is pain halved, and maybe that’s true for him, maybe his individual burden has eased. But he sees the half he’s cut from himself loaded onto Hobie, unfairly, weighing down his shoulders, dropping his expression, no doubt breaking his heart in two. Hobie dresses him down, with anger so contained it might just be disappointment, turning himself into the kind of father Theo could have had but didn’t deserve. One who cared enough to have expectations of him that grew deeper than just what Theo could have done to help him financially, one who cared enough to feel hurt by him.

When he says, “To lose a thing that should have been immortal,” Theo begins to cry.

When he says, “You lied, you destroyed your credibility. Art is sacrosanct, Theo, but trust more so,” Theo shakes his head.

“I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for him.”

“No,” Hobie says, startling Theo with its severity. “He gave you the means, sure. Facilitated the actions. But you painted these forgeries, you turned them in. You perpetrated the lie. And you did it for money.”

“I did it for our debt.”

“You did it for yourself.”

Theo falls silent, looking down at his cold tea, reckoning with his own complicity. He wants to argue again, but he knows it would be another lie, another breach of trust. He wanted it to be Boris’ fault so he wouldn’t have to justify to himself why he did this so quickly, so easily, and on some days, so gleefully. He always wanted this, even when he didn’t, because he wanted the thrill. Of success, of Boris’ approving grin, of knowing he could do something almost no one can and get away with it.

Hobie lets him stay the night in his old room, which Theo does, only because it seems like that’s what Hobie wants and after everything that’s happened, he’s still desperate to make sure he’s doing what Hobie wants. One night turns into several, Theo hiding out and helping out, his phone turned off and hidden under the bed. But it can only last so long.

On the day of Reeve’s deadline, Theo leaves Hobie’s early, lets himself into his studio, and lies on the sofa in his reception area, his body stiff and uncomfortable atop this antique that he’d proudly purchased from Hobie when he’d opened this office, no thought for comfort, only appearance. From his pocket, he pulls a bottle, spills its contents over the table scattered with weeks-old copies of  _ The New Yorker _ , and rearranges them like he’ll get a contact high just from touch.

He isn’t innocent. That’s the worst part. Hobie was right. He couldn’t consider a world in which he wouldn’t deserve to be punished for his crimes, that he should get what’s coming to him. He made a bad gamble, took too big of a risk, and he knows what the payout is. He stares at the neat line of white pills and thinks of his father doing his version of this. He thinks of his father and tries to remember how he’d thought of him in the moment - if his father had taken the coward’s way out or if he had gotten what he deserved in the end. The only reason Theo might have stayed alive this long was to guard his painting, and now that’s gone.

The door unlocks hours later, and Theo doesn't move, not because he knows it’s Boris, not because the FBI still don’t use keys. He doesn’t move because he doesn’t see the point in fighting back anymore. He has nothing left. 

Boris scoops up the pills on the table and pockets them before he straightens up again and walks away. Theo doesn’t look after him, doesn’t argue, he’s too weak, in more ways than one. Boris comes back with a sandwich on a plate from Theo’s kitchenette in the corner. He tugs at Theo until he sits up, his chest pressed warmly to Theo’s, his hands digging firmly into Theo’s side. Boris sits on the table in front of him, hunched over and looking smaller than he ever has.

“Eat eat eat,” Boris says, pushing the sandwich at Theo’s face until he opens his mouth and takes a bite. It’s probably peanut butter, that’s all he has, but it tastes like ash on his tongue. He swallows it hard anyway, letting Boris feed him bite after bite, thumbing off the crumbs around his lips.

Boris came back, but he was always going to come back. So long as there was something he needed from Theo. There has to be something now, but Theo can’t imagine what it would be. All Theo knows is he can’t keep him, not after what he’s done. He doesn’t know if he trusts Boris to be the one to pull him out of the rubble, to wipe the dust off of him and steal him away. If Boris goes down, Theo goes down too - and vice versa. Not just for the forgeries, he knows, because the unnameable thing between them is love. It isn’t a matter of whether he does love Boris, it’s that he can’t.

“You took it.”

Boris nods. “I came back after I gave it to you.”

“How? I was - I would have heard - ”

“Potter, you were blacked out in your bed. Plane could have come smashing in through the roof, you would not have known. What did you take? Was it these?” Boris pats at his pocket.

“I don’t - I.” Theo doesn’t remember because his brain is wrapped up recreating an image of Boris at the doorway of his bedroom, watching Theo sleep like the dead without knowing it, his eyes maybe laser focused on the movement of Theo’s chest just to make sure he’s still breathing. Would he have come in? If he had not stolen Theo’s painting, would he have gotten in Theo’s bed, arm braced over Theo’s chest in support? It’s a ridiculous thing to imagine in face of the truth - Boris didn’t. Boris left, and he took the gallery that makes up Theo’s soul instead. “Where is my painting?”

“Everything is okay,” Boris says, which sounds like a confirmation of Theo’s worst suspicion. He caved and gave it to Reeve. God knows what Reeve will do to it, where it will go, what harm it will suffer, the danger it will encounter at the hands of someone who doesn’t love it, someone who doesn’t see its true value.

“Is it?”

“I promised.”

“They’re just going to come back. Reeve - he’ll just - he’ll sic them on me again when he wants something more, he’ll - ”

“No. You don’t have to worry about him.”

“But the police - ”

Boris laughs sharply. “Fuck the police.”

“Boris,” is all Theo says, but it’s enough. Boris is still tuned to his wavelength, he has been since the first moment he’d stepped into Theo’s studio, even if Theo had been too stupid to realize it at first. 

Boris talks, because he’s good at it, and there’s too much for Theo to wrap his head around but the highlights, for now. Boris set Reeve up. It’s been in the works for weeks, which means Boris always knew more than Theo ever did, was always four steps or more ahead of him. The FBI have recovered  _ The Goldfinch,  _ a few of Theo’s forgeries, finished or half finished, some of his paints and equipment, all of the pieces coming together to mistake an identity, to weave a certain story based on the artist’s intent. And Boris is an artist with a particular aptitude for storytelling.

Boris was right. He took care of Theo. He promised. He apologizes, not just for the theft, but for the lies, the way he’d lose himself in the job and in doing so lose tenderness. “I am _ so sorry,  _ Potter,” he breathes. Theo thinks he means it, he thinks Boris intends to mean it, even if he doesn’t mean it, even if he doesn’t fully understand what he’s done.

Theo stares down at his phone, open to the homepage of  _ The New York Times _ , proclaiming breaking news, which missed the print deadline for that morning. Boris looks down at it too and says, “Your bird is free. Are you happy?”

There are a hundred reasons to say no, but only one to say yes. It had taken one day for Theo’s world to crumble, but now the smoke is beginning to clear. So Theo says, “Yes.”

Boris nods, like that was all he needed to hear. “You know, you shouldn’t think the worst of me.”

“You shouldn’t think the best of me,” Theo answers, thinking of the many wild compliments Boris has thrown his way about his time and talent, the way he’s built Theo up like he’s worthy of the pedestal he’s been stood on. 

“I don’t. I think of you.” 

At least it sounds like the truth. Theo lets it stay one, lets them both live in a world where someone could know the best and worst parts of Theo and not find him wanting. It hasn’t happened before.

There’s a beep in Boris’ pocket that breaks the silence between them. He sends a reply with painfully slow typing on his nine-key, then catches Theo looking down at the flip phone. He waves it. “Smartphone is liability. Not so smart, it seems. It is better if everything goes back to the way it was.”

“Yeah.”

He can’t remember life the way it was, without Boris’ fingerprints on every surface. Has it been a year? Time moves differently in Boris’ care. Theo doesn’t know if what he’s feeling is relief, reluctance, or resigned. He doesn’t know what to leave Boris with, because it’s not going to be an apology, and it’s not going to be absolution.

Theo has an image in his mind, suddenly, Boris on the diving board, holding onto Theo’s wrists, whispering  _ I got you _ like it was a secret. It pairs with a feeling in his stomach, the way his whole body had felt like it was expanding, infinite, that he knew, logically, was just the pill hitting him, but he thought, wistfully, it was the thrill of someone looking at him, truly looking at him, for the first time in years.

Eventually they’d crawled off the board, they’d shuffled home in the same direction, parting in the street to go their separate ways. Eventually Theo had left Vegas forever, never looking back, never thinking once of the way the boy that hated everyone but grinned at him. Theo had found a way to live without Boris, to forget him completely. Theo doesn’t believe nothing is everlasting, though, and if things go back to the way it was, whatever that means for the both of them, Boris can’t fully leave him.  _ You’ve scarred me _ or  _ you’ve stained me _ sound harsh, but they also sound true.

Boris caught him and burned his mark on his heart.

\----

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so kindly for reading this, we both very much appreciate it. short epilogue to follow xx


	15. epilogue

As a kid, when Theo first learned he would die, sometimes he refused to sleep because he’d convinced himself he’d die in the night while sleeping, slipping away unnoticed, until he realized how awful it must be to die awake. Until he imagined someone’s pulse-pounding last moments, whether they realized that’s what they were or not, and thought that’s just enough time to die full of regret. 

Theo died at the Met, whatever he had been then couldn’t sustain life. In the dust and rubble, he was reborn, granted life again, and every day since then squandered it. 

Boris was right, he found life every day through the reproductions - the forgeries - he found what he thought was his value, he made up what he thought was his sole worth. Those who can’t do, forge - those who can forge, eventually do. Some days, but not all, guilt lingers and festers. Maybe if he had gone to prison, he’d have reason to feel alone. But Boris had left enough with Reeve to suggest, in the event of future discoveries, the FBI already have their culprit, and Theo has been able to walk free.

He had been reborn again the day  _ The Goldfinch  _ was granted freedom from him, and has tried every day to live honestly. Not by the law, because that has no meaning to him, but honestly by himself, by the kind of person he wants to be, the kind he can be proud of, to not live and work and walk around with the facsimile of fulfillment but rather some amount, however small, of the real thing. It’s a grey area, undefined. But art exists in the grey area, and that’s what Theo understands.

He paints, still, for himself, for Hobie, for Boris, though he doesn’t know if those packages ever arrive, if he even still lives in the East Village. None of them go up for sale because he still can’t convince himself to stop laughing long enough to take himself seriously. He buys back all of Hobie’s changelings, one by one, with every dollar he ever earned from Boris. His conscience is still opaque, but Hobie will remain untouched, if it’s the last thing Theo ever does.

And he works, taking  _ back to the way it was  _ to heart, even if every painting that passes through his studio is a not-so-subtle reminder of what they’d done together. Theo dreams of one day seeing his own work on a wall in a small gallery or someone’s home in the Hamptons, and the works on keeping the kind of straight face he’ll need to maintain.

He does eventually, only once, about a year and a half after the last day he’d seen Boris, in Miami, on the wall at the summer home of a Wall Street exec who flew Theo down rather than deigning to bring his work to Theo’s office. 

Theo’s mouth quirks into a half smile, in spite of himself. He did enjoy the combination of pastel colors on this one. “This is a lovely piece.”

“Monet painted it in 1932, a gift for the president of France himself, LeBrun,” the exec says proudly. “It once hung in Versailles.”

Theo hums. The bullshit Boris used to spread, honestly, if someone fell for a lie like that, they deserved to. “I had thought Monet had died in 1926.”

“No, the provenance states its origin in 1932.” 

“Well, I could be wrong,” Theo says, but he isn’t.

“I bought it from a certified Monet expert.”

Theo presses his lips together - certified expert, certified by whom, exactly, the fucking Sorbonne? - but in the end he can’t stop himself from asking, “Who was that?”

“Peter McAllister. Do you know him?”

“I’ve heard the name.”

“Good man. Funny accent,” he says as he stomps down the rest of the corridor, leaving Theo behind.

Theo lines up his phone and quickly snaps a picture of the painting. He sends it off to Boris, contextless, knowing it’ll take him ages to load the picture then squint at it on that ancient Nokia of his. If he bothers to read it, that is. 

The work is long - the other painting he has is authentic, and the real thing always takes far longer to prove than a fake - dark by the time Theo’s done. Theo is surprised when a response buzzes in Theo’s pocket, just as he’s stepped out into the driveway, a succinct and very Boris. 

_ LOL _

Theo stares at the little green message in surprise, his mouth hanging open where he stands. 

_ U in Miami ?  _ comes next. It’s followed by an address. 

\----

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! if you need us, we're [here](https://foxesmouth.tumblr.com/) and [here](https://putanauhere.tumblr.com/tagged/portrait+of+the+artist).


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